Massive outage affects leading banks, social media platforms and even Dudley Council’s phone lines
A DNS error seems to have been the cause of a major outage in the online cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a market leader in such services, and the outage meant more than a thousand leading apps and websites were offline for much of yesterday.
Photo by Amanda Lohr (mandyxclear) / Openverse
The outage lasted some 16 hours, between 07:00 and 23:00 BST, though there continue to be some lasting effects.
Amazon’s own services were affected by the outage. The website, amazon.com, was temporarily down and Alexa smart speakers and Ring doorbells ceased to function.
Among the big names affected by the outage were HMRC, banks such as Halifax and Lloyds, social media sites Reddit, Signal and Snapchat, the online game Fortnite and language app Duolingo. Dudley Council issued a statement at 13:00 that ‘global issues’ were affected its phone lines, but added that, ‘Our online services are currently unaffected.’
Downdetector, a service which monitors platform outages, says that at one point yesterday it received more than 11m reports of problems with AWS.
In a statement, Amazon said that the underlying issue had been resolved, and ‘”appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.’
(The Domain Name System (DNS) is basically the way that web browsers recognise and connect to the addresses of websites; if it’s not working, browsers get lost. US-EAST-1 is one of a series of separate, isolated datacentres known as ‘availability zones’ (AZs) that make up the system; having separated, isolated AZs is meant to ensure the whole network is safe from such outages.)
Further details of what went wrong and how Amazon tackled the problem are expected in due course.
The outage has been widely reported across the tech world. One issue raised is the increasing reliance we place on such technologies to provide essential services – such as those delivered by local authorities.
Some have said the outage highlights the danger of placing so much reliance on a small number of providers. It’s thought some 70% of cloud computing systems are thought to depend on systems run by just three companies: Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Cori Crider, Executive Director of the think-tank Future of Technology Institute, told the BBC: ‘Once you have a concentrated supply in a handful of monopoly providers, when something like this falls over, it takes a huge percentage of the economy out with it.
‘We should really look at trying to buy more local services, rather than relying on a handful of American monopoly platforms. That’s a risk to our security, our sovereignty and our economy and we need to look at structural separations to make our markets more resilient to these kind of shocks.’
Tech news site the Register argues that what happened yesterday exposes the ‘Achilles heel’ of the online services. Reporter Dan Robinson says that we can mitigate risks by designing ‘applications and services to run in multiple AZs to avoid being taken down by a failure in one of them.
‘Any organisation whose resiliency plans extend to duplicating resources across two or more different cloud platforms will no doubt be feeling smug right now, but that level of redundancy costs money.’
We await more details about what happened at AWS and how Amazon addressed it. But the more interesting thing to watch in coming weeks will be how organisations relying on this technology respond…
In related news:
Chinese councils briefed on AI and data, so what about Britain?
Opinion: Increased demand for fixed-term cyber security contracts
Leave a Reply