On October 20, many users reported no access or interruptions when using online platforms such as Canva, Duolingo, Zoom, Snapchat, Reddit or Fortnite games.
According to Reuters and Time, the incident was determined to have occurred at a large data center located in Virginia (USA) of Amazon Web Services (AWS) - the world's largest cloud computing service provider. This is the main infrastructure area that hundreds of websites and applications depend on to operate. When this region has problems, many services around the world are affected at the same time.
AWS said the problem stemmed from disruption of the DynamoDB domain name classification system (DNS) and database, causing many services to not be able to connect. By the afternoon of the same day, Amazon reported that signs of recovery had emerged but the handling of the backlog of requests was still ongoing.
Experts say this was not a cyber attack but an internal defect of cloud infrastructure. However, the incident shows the growing dependence of platforms on a single vendor. When a data area has a problem, a global system can paralyze the chain.
Technology experts say this is a warning about the risks of concentrating in digital infrastructure. Enterprises need to build a multi-regional, multi-provider model to ensure continuous operation when similar incidents occur in the future.
According to records, by the evening of October 20, many of the above online platforms had access but some features were still having errors, typically Canva could only download images but could not download videos.
