Photo by Bunyamin Cicek on Pexels

A widespread disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) rippled across the internet, briefly impacting major online services, including the AI platform ChatGPT, alongside Amazon itself, Alexa, Snapchat, and Fortnite. The outage, largely centered in the US-EAST-1 region, lasted for several hours, crippling applications dependent on AWS’s cloud computing infrastructure. While some platforms, such as Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, report full recovery, others continue to grapple with residual effects. The culprit? A DNS issue within the EC2 internal network. This incident serves as a stark reminder of the reliance, and therefore vulnerability, of the modern internet on the stability of core cloud providers.