What the Huge AWS Outage Reveals About the Internet

[CentralMass]

https://www.wired.com/story/what-that-huge-aws-outage-reveals-about-the-internet/#:~:text=Problems%20began%20around%203%20am,additional%20time%20to%20fully%20process.%E2%80%9D

"Amazon Web Services experienced DNS resolution issues on Monday morning, taking down wide swaths of the web—and highlighting a long-standing weakness in the internet's infrastructure.
A massive cloud outage stemming from Amazon Web Services’ key US-EAST-1 region, its hub in northern Virginia, near the US Capitol, caused widespread disruptions of websites and platforms around the world on Monday morning. Amazon's main ecommerce platform and other properties, including Ring doorbells and the Alexa smart assistant, suffered interruptions and outages throughout the morning, as did Meta's communication platform WhatsApp, OpenAI's ChatGPT, PayPal's Venmo payment platform, multiple web services from Epic Games, multiple British government sites, and many others.

The outages stemmed from Amazon's DynamoDB database application programming interfaces in US-EAST-1, and AWS said in status updates that the problem was specifically related to DNS resolution issues. The “domain name system” is a foundational internet service that essentially acts as an automatic phonebook lookup to translate web URLs like www.wired.com into numeric server IP addresses so web browsers show users the right content. DNS resolution issues occur when DNS servers aren't accurately connecting these dots and, to keep with the phonebook analogy, are providing the wrong numbers for a given name, or vice versa.

An AWS spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked for details about the nature of the failure. DNS resolution issues can be malicious—known as DNS hijacking—but there is no indication that Monday's AWS outages were nefarious.

“When the system couldn't correctly resolve which server to connect to, cascading failures took down services across the internet,” says Davi Ottenheimer, a longtime security operations and compliance manager and a vice president at the data infrastructure company Inrupt. “Today's AWS outage is a classic availability problem, and we need to start seeing it more as data integrity failure.”

[Initech]

1. Hey free enterprise people, you see how fucking dangerous it is for one company to control half the internet now?

When that company goes down, it will affect yours too!

[CentralMass]

2. I'm wondering if something "nefarious" has ocurred.

[Initech]

3. If I were to go out on a limb, I'd say something more stupid than nefarious.

[CentralMass]

4. I put nothing past the Mango Malefactor.

[slightlv]

12. Probably an update, especially to database software...

It seems the bigger the company, the less likely they practice safe, best practices when they update... no backup made of the original files and database, perform it on a "test" server running the same software as the one needing to be updated, etc. They just apply the update and hope for the best!

[ancianita]

10. No. It's clear from WIRED... that it's an ongoing review problem for big cloud services, which AWS is.

“When the system couldn't correctly resolve which server to connect to, cascading failures took down services across the internet,” says Davi Ottenheimer, a longtime security operations and compliance manager and a vice president at the data infrastructure company Inrupt. “Today's AWS outage is a classic availability problem, and we need to start seeing it more as data integrity failure.”

This problem is more likely to come with massive scale global computing. Its customer base are entities like
NASA, the CIA, more than 80% of Germany's listed DAX companies, the U.S. Navy, DISH Network, GCHQ, MI5, MI6, the Ministry of Defence, and since 2022, Amazon shared a $9 billion contract from the United States Department of Defense for cloud computing with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services

That doesn't mean that there no nefarious occurrences, there are; just not this time.
If there were, we wouldn't know about them, anyway, because a lot of its customers operate under national security classified rules.
While WIRED gives a bit of "reveal" here, what could be a bigger and more serious 'reveal' about the Internet won't come to public knowledge until after it's happened (as in this case), and more likely than not, never.

DNS attacks are increasing mostly because of AI use, which tells you that AI isn't in good customer hands, and itself exponentially causes big scale computing problems.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/4055796/why-domain-based-attacks-will-continue-to-wreak-havoc.html

[hunter]

5. Fascist spyware installation went awry. No worries, it's all working now.

Big brother is watching you.



--or--



???

[CentralMass]

7. ☝️

[lostnfound]

8. It's actually NOT working. University software is down for students, including mine. Nt

[CentralMass]

9. But why ? It apparently was DNS issuse. All web traffic go through a Domain Name Server to resolve the address.

[hunter]

15. I was talking about the spyware working, not the internet.

[haele]

6. "Idunno, boss, we just made hooked in that big AI site managers like they told us to...

And now everything just went to shit...looks like the server's trying to randomly auto complete domain names on its own whenever it goes to retrieve them..."

That's what I think happened....

[Mr. Evil]

11. Uh oh,

looks like George Soros is at it again!


(yeah, yeah I know, just in case)

[BattleRow]

13. Expect some tool to blame Joe Biden.

[fujiyamasan]

14. I'm not seeing evidence of anything malicious here

This kind of thing can happen with any single point of failure and it sounds like it started cascading.

I wonder if it will get IT departments to reconsider their strategy of having only one big cloud provider handle everything. They may go multi cloud (avoid vendor lock in) or hybrid, though I doubt many companies want to reopen data centers again (huge capital expenditures on the books and it’s a lot of infrastructure to maintain). The reality is cloud computing offers too many benefits, without having to invest as much in hardware.