After a day of glitches and frustrations, officials know what caused the massive Amazon Web Services outage on Monday.
Monday’s computer problems were the third time in five years that the AWS US-EAST-1 system went down, impacting global business, Reuters reported.
It wasn’t a hack, but instead it had a Domain Name System or DNS error that occurred at AWS’s US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, Reuters and the BBC reported.
Amazon had said it was a problem within the “EC2 internal network” or the “Elastic Compute Cloud” service that, according to Reuters, "provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS."
As the BBC explained, “DNS is supposed to act like a map.” The error basically lost the map, not allowing devices to find websites. The sites were still there, but AWS couldn’t direct laptops, phones and tablets to get to them.
Typically, DNS errors happen because of human error, such as a configuration issue; sometimes, in rare cases, it can be a cyber attack, but there is no indication that the latter is what caused Monday’s headaches, the BBC reported.
The problem was that it happened at AWS’s plant, which is not only the oldest Amazon has, but also its largest site.
Again, as the BBC explained, "experts said it was a textbook illustration of the risks of putting all of your eggs in one basket in terms of a service provider - AWS is a giant and millions of businesses rely on it."
Because of how many sites AWS serves, people around the globe were not able to do their normal web work as payment systems went down, airline tickets could not be changed and Zoom calls could not be completed, Reuters reported. It also impacted the British government’s website, Venmo, Coinbase and Ring doorbells, The New York Times reported.
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