The internet was hit by an hours-long outage that took down many of the world’s biggest apps and services in Monday.
Snapchat, Slack, Fortnite and Roblox were all taken offline during the technical problems, which began early in the morning and lasted through much of the day.
Soon after it began, the problem was traced to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) facility that appeared to have undergone problems. The company said that the issues were related to a data centre in northern Virginia, and the problem was with the domain name system, which works as the internet’s phone book.
AWS provides the infrastructure of much of the internet, meaning that even a relatively small technical issue can take down huge platforms that might not obviously be connected to Amazon. It is the largest company of its kind.
Around three hours after the problems began, Amazon said that it had located the root cause of the issue and implemented a fix. But the vast and interlinked nature of the internet meant that fix took some time to be applied.
As such, Snapchat, Reddit, Duolingo, Roblox, Amazon Prime Video and more were all offline or not performing properly as usual for hours, according to tracking website Down Detector.
Professor Oli Buckley, an expert in cyber security at Loughborough University, said DNS is “essentially a phone book for the internet, it tells devices where they need to go to find a particular service”.
He added: “When this happens it hits thousands of systems that rely on it, and they can’t find the right server.
“Ultimately this means that they slow down as they try to locate it, and eventually just stop trying.”
Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN, said the outages highlighted “a serious issue with how some of the world’s biggest companies often rely on the same digital infrastructure, meaning that when one domino falls, they all do”.
Mr Briedis said: “From streaming services to online banking, so much of our digital life depends on just a few cloud providers. While Amazon Web Services might already have found the technical fault, this still provides a prime opportunity for hackers to look for vulnerabilities while defences may be down for affected companies.
“In the hours ahead, as AWS works to fix the issue, look out for potential phishing emails or messages that try to deceive you into clicking on malicious links or ask you to urgently change your details to protect your account. These could be attempts to infect your devices with malware or steal your data.”
