Core Viewpoint - The recent outage of Amazon AWS has highlighted the vulnerability of modern internet infrastructure, affecting millions of users and various industries globally [2][3][13]. Group 1: Incident Overview - On October 20, a significant internet outage occurred, lasting over 15 hours and impacting countless businesses and users worldwide [2][3]. - Major affected services included Amazon's own platforms, Duolingo, Snapchat, Reddit, Disney+, Apple TV, Roblox, Fortnite, Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Ubisoft, and various financial services like Robinhood and Coinbase [4]. - The outage was described as "half of the internet being unavailable," marking it as one of the most severe AWS incidents in recent years [8]. Group 2: Technical Details - The root cause of the outage was identified as an issue with the DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API, which prevented the system from locating the network address of this critical database service [10]. - The problem originated from the US-EAST-1 data center, which is Amazon's oldest, largest, and busiest data center cluster [10][12]. - This incident marks at least the third major outage linked to the US-EAST-1 data center in the past five years, raising concerns about its reliability [12]. Group 3: Industry Implications - The incident underscores the dependency of the global internet on a few large cloud computing companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, for foundational infrastructure [16][17]. - The outage illustrates the fragility of modern society's reliance on internet services, which have become as essential as utilities like water and electricity [15]. - Experts suggest that while such issues can cause significant disruption, they are typically resolved relatively quickly, with no indications of a cyberattack being involved [18].