How did Amazon’s bug cause the internet to collapse?
A massive technical fault brought the web to a standstill
Monday 20 October was all set to be another busy day online, with trillions of clicks, searches and transactions. But a problem was developing in one of Amazon’s huge US data centres in northern Virginia. At 3.11am (8.11am in the UK) its DNS started to fail. Within minutes much of the internet worldwide had stopped working.
You might wonder what an online retailer like Amazon has to do with running the internet. The answer is Amazon Web Services (AWS), launched in 2006, which rents out computing power and tools so businesses can run websites, apps and online services without building their own data centres.