Amazon’s (AMZN) AWS is back online after a day-long outage that impacted companies and organizations across the country and globe, knocking out websites and apps for millions.
If you were one of the lucky few who got an impromptu day off from work or school, welcome back. But if you were one of the unlucky ones who had a much more difficult Monday than usual, welcome to the modern internet.
According to Amazon, the outage originated at the company’s Virginia data center, called US-East-1, and had to do with a domain name system issue and Amazon’s DynamoDB database service.
Think of the domain name system as a kind of phone book for the internet that takes the URLs that we type into our browsers’ address bars — www.yahoofinance.com, for instance — and translates them into the numerical IP addresses that computers recognize.
Amazon’s DynamoDB, meanwhile, is a database that allows customers to store and access data.
The whole thing led to further complications that kept websites offline for a good chunk of the workday.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen global internet outages as a result of one of the three main cloud players, which also include Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL), going offline. AWS had an issue in 2023 that knocked websites offline, and CloudStrike’s (CRWD) faulty update took down large swaths of Microsoft’s cloud services in 2024.
More broadly speaking, the Amazon outage points to the fragility of the modern internet and its reliance on a small handful cloud providers.
While there are benefits to having the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google keeping the internet’s lights on, including massive resources and standardization, it also presents major challenges like Monday’s outage.
And while major enterprises and government offices often rely on more than one cloud provider to avoid going offline, smaller companies and organizations may not have the kind of cash necessary to subscribe to multiple cloud services.
Does that mean we’ll see any major changes to the internet come of the latest outage? Probably not. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will continue to dominate the cloud landscape, and if one of them goes down, the internet likely will once again too.
Hopefully, at worst, you get the day off.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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Amazon’s (AMZN) AWS is back online after a day-long outage that impacted companies and organizations across the country and globe, knocking out websites and apps for millions.
If you were one of the lucky few who got an impromptu day off from work or school, welcome back. But if you were one of the unlucky ones who had a much more difficult Monday than usual, welcome to the modern internet.
According to Amazon, the outage originated at the company’s Virginia data center, called US-East-1, and had to do with a domain name system issue and Amazon’s DynamoDB database service.
Think of the domain name system as a kind of phone book for the internet that takes the URLs that we type into our browsers’ address bars — www.yahoofinance.com, for instance — and translates them into the numerical IP addresses that computers recognize.
Amazon’s DynamoDB, meanwhile, is a database that allows customers to store and access data.
The whole thing led to further complications that kept websites offline for a good chunk of the workday.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen global internet outages as a result of one of the three main cloud players, which also include Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL), going offline. AWS had an issue in 2023 that knocked websites offline, and CloudStrike’s (CRWD) faulty update took down large swaths of Microsoft’s cloud services in 2024.
More broadly speaking, the Amazon outage points to the fragility of the modern internet and its reliance on a small handful cloud providers.
While there are benefits to having the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google keeping the internet’s lights on, including massive resources and standardization, it also presents major challenges like Monday’s outage.
And while major enterprises and government offices often rely on more than one cloud provider to avoid going offline, smaller companies and organizations may not have the kind of cash necessary to subscribe to multiple cloud services.
Does that mean we’ll see any major changes to the internet come of the latest outage? Probably not. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will continue to dominate the cloud landscape, and if one of them goes down, the internet likely will once again too.
Hopefully, at worst, you get the day off.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley.
Click here for the latest technology news that will impact the stock market
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
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