\n<\/p>\n
Dan Milmo<\/span><\/p>\n A major internet outage has hit dozens of websites and apps around the world, with users reporting troubles getting online after problems at Amazon\u2019s cloud computing service.<\/strong><\/p>\n The affected platforms include Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.<\/p>\n In the UK, Lloyds bank was affected as well as its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, while there were also reports of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs website on Monday morning. Also in the UK, multiple Ring users took to social media to complaint their doorbells were not working.<\/p>\n In the UK alone reports of problems on individual apps ran into the tens of thousands for each platform. More here:<\/p>\n Share<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Key events<\/p>\n <\/span>Show key events only<\/p>\n Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n By bringing down popular web sites, apps and services across the world, the problem with Amazon\u2019s DynamoDB database service has highlighted just how dependent global businesses and users are on the company\u2019s web services.<\/strong><\/p>\n Cori Crider, <\/strong>executive director of the Future<\/strong> of<\/strong> Technology<\/strong> <\/em>Institute<\/strong>, has warned that the UK is \u201cdangerously overexposed to foreign Big Tech monopolies\u201d, saying:<\/p>\n \u201cThe UK can\u2019t keep leaving its critical infrastructure at the mercy of US tech giants. With Amazon Web Services down, we\u2019ve seen the lights go out across the modern economy – from banking to communications.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t just an inconvenience; it\u2019s a strategic vulnerability. Britain is dangerously overexposed to foreign Big Tech monopolies that don\u2019t answer to UK regulators or the public. If we want digital resilience, the answer isn\u2019t just better oversight – it\u2019s digital sovereignty. We need to build and back British cloud infrastructure that secures our economy and safeguards our future.\u201d<\/p>\n Britain\u2019s competition watchdog recently conducted an inquiry into cloud computing, which concluded that it could designate both Microsoft<\/strong> and AWS<\/strong> as companies with \u201cstrategic market status\u201d in cloud services, which would give the watchdog the power to tackle conduct that could undermine fair competition, or exploit people and businesses.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Some of the services which were forced offline by the problems at Amazon Web Services are returning to action.<\/strong><\/p>\n The UK\u2019s tax office, HMRC<\/strong>, is now able to process login requests on its site again.<\/p>\n Canva<\/strong>, the online design and visual communication platform, reports that \u201cthe majority of functionality\u201d has been recovered, but also warns that users may still see issues with downloading designs.<\/p>\n [awkwardly, Amazon has promoted Canva as an innovator which uses AWS to \u201cto deliver seamless, personalized design experiences to over 235 million monthly users worldwide\u201d.]<\/p>\n However, internet doorbell service Ring<\/strong> is still reporting a \u2018partial outage\u2019 on its website and apps.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Encouragingly, AWS<\/strong> are now rating the severity of today\u2019s outage as \u201cimpacted\u201d.<\/p>\n Earlier, when apps and websites across the Internet were stricken, it was rated as \u201cdegraded\u201d (a more severe situation).<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n We flagged earlier that the disruption at Amazon Web Services involved DynamoDB, one of its core infrastructure services.<\/strong><\/p>\n Mike Chapple<\/strong>, IT professor at the University of Notre Dame\u2019s<\/strong> Mendoza College of Business, explains why DynamoDB is important, and why its failure has caused so much disruption today:<\/p>\n DynamoDB isn\u2019t a term that most consumers know, but it underpins the apps and services that all of us use every single day. It\u2019s a centralized database service that many Internet-based services use to track user information, store key data, and manage their operations. DynamoDB is one of the record-keepers of the modern Internet. It\u2019s fast, it\u2019s cheap, and it\u2019s reliable.<\/p>\n But today it stopped working and we saw the effects of that outage ripple across the Internet. We\u2019ll learn more in the hours and days ahead but early reports indicate that this wasn\u2019t actually a problem with the database itself. The data appears to be safe. Instead, something went wrong with the records that tell other systems where to find their data. Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data.<\/p>\n It\u2019s as if large portions of the Internet suffered temporary amnesia. This episode serves as a reminder of how dependent the world is on a handful of major cloud service providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When a major cloud provider sneezes, the Internet catches a cold.\u201d<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Marek Szustak<\/strong>, IT Security Officer at online travel agency eSky<\/strong> Group<\/strong>, isn\u2019t surprised to hear that today\u2019s problems relate to the Domain Name System<\/strong> (effectively the internet\u2019s phonebook).<\/p>\n Szustak<\/strong> explains:<\/p>\n Today\u2019s outage in the AWS US-EAST-1 region shows how even the largest cloud environments can be paralysed by a seemingly minor piece of infrastructure. In this case, the problem concerned DNS, the foundation of network communication. When domain name resolution stops working, entire applications and services can stop responding, no matter how well they are designed.<\/p>\n This is a good lesson for companies using the cloud: it is worth designing systems so that a failure in one region or provider does not bring the entire business to a halt. Redundancy, geographical distribution of resources and testing of emergency scenarios should be the norm, not a luxury.<\/p>\n And besides, as engineers say, it\u2019s always DNS…<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Although services seem to be coming back online, it appears the problem at AWS isn\u2019t fully fixed yet.<\/strong><\/p>\n In its latest update, the cloud computing operator says:<\/p>\n We are continuing to work towards full recovery for EC2 launch errors, which may manifest as an Insufficient Capacity Error. Additionally, we continue to work toward mitigation for elevated polling delays for Lambda, specifically for Lambda Event Source Mappings for SQS.<\/p>\n We will provide an update by 5:00 AM PDT [that\u2019s 1pm in the UK].<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n According to TechRadar, the popular word game Wordle was hit by today\u2019s outage.<\/p>\n Wordle\u2019s working OK now, though* \u2013 an indication that the worst of today\u2019s outages may be over, given AWS\u2019s progress in fixing the problem<\/p>\n (* yes I got it, but it took five guesses, so only just\u2026<\/em>)<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n A Lloyds Bank spokesperson has asked customers to \u2018bear\u2019 with it, while it works to bring services back online, saying:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIssues with Amazon Web Services are affecting some of our services right now.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re sorry about this and ask customers to bear with us while we work to bring all our services back online as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Another update from Amazon Web Services, who report that the underlying issue causing today\u2019s outage has now been \u201cfully mitigated.<\/strong><\/p>\n In an update timestamped at 3:35 AM PDT<\/strong> (or 11.35am UK time), AWS says:<\/p>\n The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution. Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as Cloudtrail and Lambda.<\/p>\n The DNS<\/strong>, or Domain Name System (DNS<\/strong>) is used to map addresses on the internet, by translating human-readable domain name (such as www.the guardian.com) into numerical IP addresses that can be read by routers to direct traffic across the web.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Today\u2019s outage does not appear to be caused by a cyber-attack, reports Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a lecturer in computer science at Keele University, who explains:<\/strong><\/p>\n The issue appears to be related to AWS (Amazon Web Services), which hosts the infrastructure that underpins much the internet services. It allows customers to deploy their own servers, databases, and storage without the need to own physical infrastructure.<\/p>\n According to AWS\u2019s latest update, they have identified the root cause of the outage. It appears to be significant error rates for requests made to their data storage service, DynamoDB, in the US-EAST region. Therefore, the outage was not caused by cyber-related attacks, as was speculated.<\/p>\n Resolving major outages like this presents significant challenges because of the cloud complexity and its dependencies. Furthermore, diagnoses need to see how much third-party platforms are dependent on AWS cloud. The solution and fix will involve thorough diagnostics, testing, and deployment of a reliable fix, which, based on past incidents in the industry, can take anywhere from hours to several days.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Full story: Amazon Web Services outage hits dozens of websites and apps Dan Milmo A major internet outage has hit dozens of websites and apps around the world, with users reporting troubles getting online after problems at Amazon\u2019s cloud computing service. The affected platforms include Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[422,5930,303,1891,102,1145,132,5758,2943,1399,181,3352,7015],"class_list":{"0":"post-29290","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-amazon","9":"tag-apps","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-claims","12":"tag-hits","13":"tag-internet","14":"tag-live","15":"tag-outage","16":"tag-recovery","17":"tag-services","18":"tag-signs","19":"tag-web","20":"tag-websites"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}AWS outage shows perils of relying on US tech giants<\/h2>\n
Some services are restored, others still report problems<\/h2>\n
Expert: Why DynamoDB problems caused global outage<\/h2>\n
“It’s always DNS”<\/h2>\n
AWS: The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated<\/h2>\n