The Day the Cloud Broke: Unpacking the Massive AWS Outage

On this episode of Tech Brewed, host Greg Doig dives into the chaos that unfolded when Amazon Web Services—one of the Internet’s backbone providers—suffered a major outage. From your bank app to your favorite gaming platform, over 2,000 companies were knocked offline, revealing just how dependent our daily digital lives have become on a handful of tech giants. Greg breaks down what caused the disruption, why a simple DNS issue can ripple across the globe, and what it means for the future of cloud computing. Tune in for a clear, relatable look at the hidden fragility of our digital world, the risks of single points of failure, and practical advice on staying resilient when the web goes dark.

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Transcript

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Hey, everyone, welcome back. I'm Greg Doig, and if you tried to check your bank balance, scroll through Reddit, or fire up your PlayStation yesterday, you might have been met with error messages and loading screens that just wouldn't quit. That's because at

12: 0:14

07am Pacific Time on October 20, one of the biggest players in the Internet's invisible infrastructure had what we in the tech world call a very bad day. Amazon Web Services, or aws, went down. And when AWS sneezes, the entire Internet catches a cold. We're talking about over 2,000 companies affected. Snapchat went dark. Vembo couldn't process payments. Even Amazon's own services were knocked offline by their own cloud platform. It's like watching a mechanic's car break down in their own garage. But we're going to take a look at what happened, why it matters more than you might think, and what this tells us about the hidden fragility of our digital world. So let's start with the technical stuff, but I promise to keep it digestible. At its core, this wasn't some elaborate cyber attack or dramatic server explosion. It was something much more mundane and, honestly, more terrifying. A DNS issue. DNS, or Domain Name System, is basically the Internet's phonebook. When you type Reddit.com, dNS translates that into an actual numerical address where Reddit lives. When that breaks, it's like having a phone book where all the numbers got scrambled. But here's where it gets interesting. The outage wasn't just about DNS. AWS also had problems with their internal monitoring system for network load balancers. Think of load balancers as traffic directors for Internet requests. They make sure no single server gets overwhelmed by spreading the load around. The ripple effects were immediate and massive. We saw 9.8 million outage reports globally. That's almost 10 million people trying to access something and hitting a digital brick wall. In the US alone, 2.7 million reports flooded in, maybe more. And what's fascinating, and it's frankly scary about this outage, is how it exposed. Just how much of our digital life depends on a handful of companies. We're not just talking about websites going down. We're talking about banking systems that couldn't process transactions, streaming services that left families without anything to watch, and gaming networks that kicked people out mid match. Even some smart home devices stopped responding to voice commands. And this is what experts call single point of failure risk. And it's becoming more dangerous as more companies migrate to the cloud. Sure, cloud computing offers incredible benefits Scalability, cost savings, global reach. But when you put all your eggs in one very large, very reliable basket, you better hope that basket never breaks. To AWS's credit, they didn't just shrug and say, have you tried turning it off and on again, they moved fast. Within hours, they had identified the root cause and began mitigation efforts. Here's something interesting though. They actually throttled new instance launches to speed up recovery. It's counterintuitive, right? Slow down new requests to fix the existing problems faster. But it worked. Most operations were back to normal by mid morning. Still around 280 companies were still experiencing issues even late in the morning and some into the afternoon. That's the thing about these cascading failures. They don't all resolve at once. Some dominoes take longer to stand back up. This outage is a perfect case study for a conversation we need to have about digital infrastructure resilience. We've built an Internet that's incredibly efficient and powerful, but we've also created some dangerous dependencies. Think about it this way. Aws controls about 32% of the global cloud market, Microsoft Azure has about 20%, and Google Cloud holds roughly 9%. Those three companies essentially power most of the Internet you interact with daily. And the real issue is geographic concentration. This outage originated in AWS's US East 1 region, their Virginia data center that's often called the capital of the Internet. So many services default to this region when it goes down, the impact is disproportionately massive. Experts have been warning about this for years. The solution isn't complicated. In theory, distribute your critical workloads across multiple regions and multiple providers. But in practice, it's expensive, complex, and many companies gamble that outages like this won't happen often enough to justify the investment. Now, I mentioned this wasn't a cyber attack, and AWS confirmed there's no evidence of malicious activity. But here's something worth noting. Technical failures like this can create security vulnerabilities when systems are down and then coming back online. That's prime time for phishing scams. Criminals send fake emails claiming to be from effective services, asking users to verify their accounts or update their information. People are already frustrated and confused, making them more likely to fall for these tricks. Stay alert. If you get emails about account issues from services that were affected, don't click links. Go directly to the official website instead. So what's the takeaway from the news in this digital chaos? First, this probably won't be the last time this happens. As our world becomes more connected and more dependent on cloud infrastructure, these outages become both more impactful and, unfortunately, more inevitable. Second, maybe it's time to think about your own digital resilience. Do you have backup ways to access important services? Are you prepared for a day when your go to apps just don't work? And finally, this outage is a reminder that behind all our seamless digital experiences, there is incredibly complex infrastructure maintained by human beings who sometimes make mistakes. Today's problem was traced to a monitoring system glitch, probably a few lines of code that didn't behave as expected. And as always, thanks for listening to another episode.