A technical problem at the key data center of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the US-East-1 region, Virginia (USA), on Monday morning (local time) paralyzed many large areas on the Internet.
From e-commerce platform Amazon, the Ring door system, Alexa virtual assistant to Meta's WhatsApp, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Apple's Venmo and even some British government websites were all interrupted for hours.
According to information from coaches, the cause stems from the DNS giaiglement error related to API DynamoDB, a core database service.
The Domain Name System (DNS) acts as an Internet register, shifting friendly web addresses to specific IP numbers.
When DNS had an issue, the routing process was broken, and the web browser could not find the right person to call.
AWS said the incident started at 3 a.m. (Eastern time) and the company finished fixing it by 6:35.
There is no sign that the incident originated from cyber attacks or took control of DNS, but this event has sounded a new warning bell about the vulnerability of global cloud infrastructure.
Mr. David Ottenheimer - Vice President of operations and security compliance of Inrupt Company - commented: "When the system cannot accurately determine the server that needs to be connected, line errors will disrupt services on the Internet. The AWS incident is a typical example of a viability problem, but more deeply, it reflects data integrity errors.
AWS, a cloud platform that accounts for nearly a third of the global market share, has experienced similar problems many times, including a serious outage in 2023.
Although giants like Amazon, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud have helped standardize cybersecurity and optimize performance, focusing power on a few giant data centers means that the entire Internet can be affected just by a small mistake.
Mr. Ottenheimer commented that the technology industry is relying too much on a few large data centers. According to him, as long as businesses do not truly understand and protect the integrity of data, affirming that the system always operates stably at 99.999% is just a safety illusion.
