AWS outage: Amazon finds ‘latent defect’ that took banks to smart beds offline

Amazon has revealed what caused this week’s massive internet outage that took major platforms like Signal, Snapchat, Duolingo and many banks offline.

In a statement published by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company said that the internet went down because of a bug in automation software.

The disruption affected streaming platforms, including Amazon’s Prime Video service and Disney+, as well as Perplexity AI, the Fortnite game, Airbnb, Snapchat and Duolingo.

Mobile telephone services and messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp were affected in Europe, according to Downdetector.

People also reported problems reaching websites, including Amazon’s own e-commerce shop.

Some banks, such as Lloyd’s, were also impacted and pointed to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform as the source.

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What caused the outage?

AWS said customers were unable to connect to DynamoDB, its cloud database service, because of “a latent defect within the service’s automated DNS [domain name system] management system.”

DynamoDB manages hundreds of thousands of DNS records and relies on automation to keep them updated—adding capacity when needed, handling hardware failures, and distributing traffic efficiently.

The company said the root cause was “an empty DNS record” for its Virginia-based US-East-1 data centre region. The automated system failed to repair the problem, and manual operator intervention was required to restore service.

How AWS has ruled cloud services

AWS leads the cloud computing market, followed closely by Microsoft Azure, with Google Cloud in third place. Businesses, governments and consumers worldwide rely on their infrastructure for online activities.

The British government’s websites were among those affected by Monday’s outage, according to Downdetector, which relies on users to signal online problems they encounter.

“Major providers like AWS going down represent vulnerabilities in what have become critical infrastructure for organizations and, in some cases, governments globally,” said Emarketer senior analyst Jacob Bourne.

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With inputs from agencies