Widespread AWS Service Disruption Confirmed
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed that a significant service outage was the result of a major Domain Name System (DNS) failure. The event, which occurred on a Wednesday, primarily impacted the widely used US-EAST-1 region, leading to widespread disruptions for numerous customers and services that rely on the cloud computing platform. Users first reported issues through increased error rates and an inability to access core functionalities, including the AWS Management Console.
On its official status page, Amazon initially acknowledged investigations into “increased error rates” before pinpointing the root cause. The company later updated its status to confirm that the disruption stemmed from a DNS resolution issue within the US-EAST-1 region’s internal network. This failure directly affected the critical service-to-service communications that underpin the AWS infrastructure.
DNS Failure Impacts Core AWS and Amazon Products
The DNS resolution problem had a cascading effect, disrupting a broad spectrum of AWS services. Among the key services impacted were the AWS Management Console, AWS API Gateway, AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFormation, AWS IAM, and AWS Step Functions. The outage also affected AWS CloudTrail and various AWS IoT services, demonstrating the foundational role of DNS in the platform’s architecture.
Beyond the core infrastructure services, the outage was felt by consumers of Amazon’s own products. Popular services including Ring, Alexa, and Amazon Music experienced performance degradation and availability issues, as they are built upon the same AWS infrastructure that was affected. To resolve the incident, Amazon’s engineers worked to redirect traffic away from the affected DNS server fleet, which successfully restored service availability and resolved the underlying issue for all impacted services.
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