Massive AWS Outage Brings The Internet To Its Knees, Here's The Latest Status Update

A massive outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing provider, crippled major websites, apps, and corporate services across the globe this morning. Thankfully, Amazon has been on the case (having dealt with biggies like this in the past) and most key services are already back online.

The disruption began shortly after midnight ET in AWS's US-EAST-1 region—Amazon's largest data hub in Northern Virginia. Within minutes, the effects rippled out worldwide, bringing down services from gaming and social media to e-commerce and finance.

Brownie points to you if you're already guessing that the main cause of the blackout is DNS-related. Specifically, AWS engineers traced the issue to a DNS/gateway path failure affecting the DynamoDB core database service. And since the US-EAST-1 region powers a significant chunk of the internet, a failure there quickly cascaded into a global problem.