If Zoom wouldn’t connect, YouTube froze or your smart home went dumb yesterday morning, it wasn’t just you. Over 11 million people reported issues with more than 2,500 big name apps and services.
The reason? A huge outage at Amazon Web Services, better known as AWS. Let me explain what all this means in plain English.
📦 So what is AWS?
Think of AWS like the engine under the hood of your favorite apps. You don’t see it, but it’s running everything.
When a company like Netflix, Zoom, Snapchat, Fortnite, Coinbase, Ring, Signal, your smart fridge or even Alexa herself needs a place to store data or run software, they don’t build a bunch of servers in their basement. That’s expensive and complicated.
Instead, they rent computing power from AWS, Amazon’s cloud. It’s kind of like how we don’t all own water wells anymore. We simply turn on the tap, and water flows. AWS is the tap for the internet.
💥 What went wrong?
One of Amazon Web Services’ major data centers on the East Coast had a meltdown. Because AWS is the backbone of so much of the internet with $80 billion in annual revenue and 23 million big-name customers, that one failure set off a domino effect.
The root cause? It came down to a glitch in the system that checks whether AWS’s internal tools are running smoothly. Major hiccup.
On top of that, add a DNS problem. DNS is the internet’s phone book. It translates web addresses into the behind-the-scenes numbers that tell your browser where to go. When that breaks, your device can’t find anything, even if it’s still there.
So with AWS’s tools out of sync and DNS stumbling, thousands of apps and websites went down or slowed to a crawl. Talk about a full-on cloud migraine.
🧺 Why this matters
The internet is built on a few major cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. When one has a problem, it affects everything connected to it.
That’s a lot of eggs in one digital basket. Most companies use these services because they’re fast and affordable, but it also means a single failure can take down half the internet.
But now you know why yesterday AWS cloud engineers were sure happy to have their thunderwear on. Imagine getting that call from Jeff, “What the hell is going on over there?!?”
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