A recent massive online disruption with global implications is continuing to reveal the vulnerability of the world’s online networks. Amazon has said its Amazon Web Services (AWS) returned to normal operations after a massive outage disrupted a broad range of online services. But questions remain about lingering vulnerabilities since the global tech / IT outage occurred between October 19 and October 20.
The outage shut down large parts of the internet, including websites, airlines, banks, food services and some government services.
According to Amazon, the service disruption occurred in the N. Virginia Region. The company determined that the problem was due to DNS (domain name system) resolution issues with the regional DynamoDB service endpoints. DynamoDB is a database service offered by Amazon Web Services and is designed to “seamlessly” deliver fast and predictable performance.
“We apologize for the impact this event caused our customers. While we have a strong track record of operating our services with the highest levels of availability, we know how critical our services are to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses. We know this event impacted many customers in significant ways. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further,” stated Amazon in a post-event summary.
Some Information Technology (IT) experts say the disruptions exposed companies’ vulnerabilities and the difficulties they face in bouncing back or restoring services.
“When you have these institutions that are depending on these services for revenue, you’re talking tens of thousands of dollars in liquidated damages when these services are down, when these possible customers and users can’t shop, handle transactions, or financial institutions can’t complete transactions,” stated Darnell Muhammad, a Houston-based IT specialist with over two decades of experience. “That is a major financial impact,” he added.
The impact and fallout of the outage were experienced across a broad, global spectrum. The key question, according to global internet researchers Ookla, is not who failed but how far the blast radius extended and why.
The recent AWS incident highlights how concentration risk and dependency chains can amplify impact across the internet, according to the researchers’ online post. Using Downdetector signals, Ookla researchers mapped cross-industry effects from over 17 million reports spanning consumer apps, payments, media, and enterprise tools.
“The pattern shows how a single regional issue can propagate through shared control planes and third-party integrations. The takeaway is resilience. Region isolation with well-tested failover and control-plane safeguards reduces exposure to systemic shocks. For policymakers, it means systemic oversight and transparent post-event learnings,” Ookla continued.
According to TechCrunch, several major apps were not working, including Coinbase, Fortnite, Venmo, Zoom and Amazon’s own services, including its Ring video surveillance products.
“Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, apps, and other critical online systems. The company has data centers all over the world, and Amazon is said to have at least 30% of the total cloud market,” reported TechCrunch on October 21.
Reportedly, according to FlightAware, more than 7,800 U.S. flights were delayed on October 19. It also attributed staffing shortages, bad weather and other constraints to the problem, according to CNBC News.
The education sector also suffered. According to Associated Press (AP), many college and K-12 students were unable to submit or access their homework or course materials on October 20 because the AWS outage knocked out Canvas, a widely used educational platform. One teacher reported that he could not grade any online assignments and students could not access their online materials.
AP reported that the exact number of schools impacted was not immediately known, but Canvas indicated it is used by 50% of college and university students in North America, including all Ivy League schools in the U.S. The outage also affected students at the University of California, Riverside and Ohio State University.
Betsy Cooper, a cybersecurity expert, told NPR that there are “pros and cons” to so many companies using these big providers and companies for cloud computing. There is the convenience of accessing all data in one place Ms. Cooper told NPR. However, she noted that there is a downside. “That’s great until something goes wrong, and then you really see just how dependent you are on a handful of those companies,” she said.
“I don’t know if anyone has published what losses were due to liquidated damages per second, minute, hour when you can’t make these transactions,” stated Mr. Muhammad. For example, once, Microsoft promoted a new transactional software that saved the company five cents per transaction, boasting that it did five billion transactions a day.
“If you look at one nickel times five billion transactions, just based on that mathematics, what are multiple companies losing per minute, second, hour, when their web services are down and they’re depending on that for revenue,” he continued.
As people and institutions rely on web services for daily use, getting over the vulnerability to such outages may take some time, say IT experts. But Mr. Muhammad emphasized that it is more so, can these institutions recover from what those losses represented?
“That’s why the term is used, ‘I lost in that day and a half or two hours or four hours’ liquidated damages. Those are massive numbers if you had traffic in the hundreds of thousands hitting their website per day, buying merchants’ items … . How can you put a dollar amount on that with one company when you’ve got multiple companies, financial institutions even, some airlines that were affected?” said Mr. Muhammad.