AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

Analysis Amazon's US-EAST-1 region outage caused widespread chaos, taking websites and services offline even in Europe and raising some difficult questions. After all, cloud operations are supposed to have some built-in resiliency, right?

The problems began just after midnight US Pacific Time today when Amazon Web Services (AWS) noticed increased error rates and latencies for multiple services running within its home US-EAST-1 region.

Within a couple of hours, Amazon's techies had identified DNS as a potential root cause of the issue, specifically the resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1, and were working on a fix.

However, it was affecting other AWS' services, including global services or features that rely on endpoints operating from AWS' original region such as IAM (Identity and Access Management) updates and DynamoDB global tables.

While Amazon worked to fully resolve the problem, the issue was already causing widespread chaos to websites and ...