AWS fell on its face, knocking many apps, websites and games offline

On this crisp October morning, it feels like half of the internet is dealing with a hangover. A severe Amazon Web Services outage took out many, many websites, apps, games and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud division to stay up and running.

According to the AWS service health page, Amazon was looking into "increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services" in the US-EAST-1 region (i.e. data centers in Northern Virginia) as of 3:11AM ET on Monday. By 5:01AM, AWS had figured out that a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB API was the cause of the outage. DynamoDB is a database that holds info for AWS clients.

“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data,” Mike Chapple, a teaching professor of IT, analytics ...