REPORT: Alarming reality exposed by global internet meltdown… and why Amazon’s crash is only the beginning

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From the Daily Mail: It was shortly after 8am in London when the British government’s websites began to flicker and fade.

Most of America was asleep, but a few night owls on the East Coast found their Disney streaming services stall.

Those calling Lyfts to get home from a Sunday night party were struggling. Routine activities were grinding to a halt.

As the eastern United States awoke, the scale of the problem became clear.

United Airlines and Delta found their passengers could not use online services. Commuters accustomed to scanning the New York Times’ morning newsletter went without. Snapchatters fell silent; Reddit forums were hushed.

One third of all online users worldwide interact with Amazon Web Services (AWS) daily, according to DeepField Networks: companies ranging from Venmo to Reddit to Ring all rely on AWS servers. And, on Monday morning, the system was down – crashing a significant portion of the internet.

The report quotes cybersecurity expert James Knight, senior principal at Digital Warfare, as speculating on why the outage occurred, and noted it likely cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It’s surprising that one thing affected their network, because usually there’s backup, and redundant systems all running at the same time. One particular system going down is very, very surprising,” Knight said.

The outage started at 3:11am ET. By 5:01am ET the problem had been identified, and a ‘fix’ deployed within 20 minutes. Yet it remained unresolved and, at 8:48am ET, Amazon issued another update saying further fixes were being carried out, the Daily Mail explained.

Knight insisted there’s nothing to indicate this was caused by a hack, and indicated that with so much reliance on digital services, this is just “a sign of the times, and something we simply have to learn to live with.”

“Our lives are online, and it’s just going to happen,’ Knight said, adding, “AWS, along with Google and Microsoft, are the gold standard in cloud computing. So it’s not like AWS’s rivals will be smug, because tomorrow it could happen to them.”

The issue persisted throughout the day Monday. The website for one company that the DMLNewsApp relies on did not come back online until Monday evening.

Romulus Industries, a software company, provided a list of many companies who were affected by the outage, including:

Adobe Creative Cloud
Airtable
Amazon (incl. Alexa & Prime Video)
Apple Music
Asana
AT&T
Battlefield (EA)
Blink (Security)
Boost Mobile
Canva
ChatGPT
Chime
Coinbase
CollegeBoard
Dead By Daylight
Delta Air Lines
Duolingo
EA
Fanduel
Fetch
Fortnite (Epic Games services)
GoDaddy
Grubhub
HBO Max
Hinge
Hulu
IMDb
Instacart
Kik
League of Legends
Life360
Lyft
McDonald’s app
Microsoft (incl. 365, Outlook & Teams)
MyFitnessPal
Navy Federal Credit Union
Peloton
Pinterest
PlayStation Network
Pokémon Go
Rainbow Six Siege
Reddit
Ring
Robinhood
Roblox
Roku
ShipStation
Signal
Slack
Smartsheet
Snapchat
Square
Starbucks
Steam
Strava
T-Mobile
Tidal
Trello
Ubisoft Connect
United Airlines
Venmo
Verizon
VRChat
Wall Street Journal
Whatnot
Wordle
Xbox
Xero
Xfinity by Comcast
Zillow
Zoom

One X user, Patrick Nealis, joked, “Can someone please go to Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers and unplug them, wait 30 seconds, then plug them back in? The entire US-EAST-1 region is down.”

READ MORE from the Daily Mail.

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