One AWS failure took down the internet Monday morning - what went wrong

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• A major AWS outage disrupted global websites, apps, and services.
• The issue stemmed from a DNS failure in AWS's US-East-1 region.
•  In latest update, Amazon said the AWS outage has been resolved. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the backbone of much of the modern Internet. Early Monday morning, at approximately 12:11am ET, AWS suffered a major outage. This failure knocked out dozens of websites, apps, and online platforms worldwide. The disruption originated in the company's critical US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia, AWS's largest and most essential data hub.

Widespread slowdowns and timeouts

AWS first acknowledged the issue when it detected increased error rates and latency across numerous key services, including EC2, Lambda, and DynamoDB -- Amazon's cloud database technology. Engineers later identified a Domain Name System (DNS ...