Amazon AWS Outage : US-EAST-1 Node Down
Amazon AWS Outage : US-EAST-1 Node Down
On Monday, Amazon's cloud services division, AWS, was in the process of recovering from a major outage that affected thousands of websites and some of the world’s most widely used apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, causing global business disruptions.
A major outage in Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region caused widespread disruptions Monday morning, affecting sites like Amazon, Ring, Alexa, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Venmo, and others. The issue was traced to DNS resolution problems with Amazon’s DynamoDB database APIs. AWS advised users facing ongoing issues to clear their DNS caches.
A significant cloud outage originating from Amazon Web Services’ primary US-EAST-1 region—located in northern Virginia near the US Capitol—caused widespread disruptions impacting numerous websites and platforms globally on Monday morning. Amazon’s main e-commerce site, along with services like Ring doorbells and the Alexa smart assistant, faced outages throughout the morning. Other affected services included Meta’s WhatsApp, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, PayPal’s Venmo, several Epic Games web services, various British government websites, and additional platforms.
The disruptions were identified as originating from Amazon’s DynamoDB database APIs located in US-EAST-1. AWS’s status updates indicated that the root cause was linked to DNS resolution problems.
The Domain Name System (DNS) serves as a critical internet function, acting like an automated directory that converts web addresses such as www.thenetworkdna.com into numerical IP addresses, allowing browsers to retrieve the correct content. DNS resolution failures happen when DNS servers fail to correctly translate these addresses, resulting in connection errors or misrouting.
“Our investigation suggests the issue is related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1,” AWS stated in its Monday status reports. The company subsequently advised users encountering persistent issues with resolving DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1 to clear their DNS caches.
