Featured Image Credit: Kabir Jhangiani/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Topics: Technology, Amazon
Emma Rosemurgey
Topics: Technology, Amazon
It's been a bit of a strange day on the internet after millions of people were left unable to access some of the biggest websites in the world.
Apps like Snapchat, Canva, Amazon and MyFitnessPal all attract millions of users every single day, and yet from around 8am UK time this morning, they were among the hundreds of sites suddenly not working.
The source of the issue was very quickly traced back to Amazon Web Services (AWS), a platform that provides infrastructure for much of the modern internet, by allowing companies to hire servers to run their websites and apps.
Amazon reported on their status page that there were 'increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region', adding that engineers were 'immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause'.
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And while it appears most of the affected websites are now back up and running, people have been left questioning what caused the mass worldwide internet outage? And importantly, can steps be taken to prevent it from ever happening again?
As many people have been left without access to vital services like their banking apps and access to HMRC, it's understandable that people would be left feeling vulnerable and even fearful as to what may have caused such mass disruption.
One of the most asked questions on social media appears to be whether the cloud service could have fallen victim to some kind of cyber attack or hacking.
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While there's no evidence to suggest that this is the case in terms of what happened with AWS, it certainly does raise a lot of questions about the fragility of having a third of the world's internet using the same source platform.
There has been a rise in the number of cyber attacks in recent years and even months, with large companies like Jaguar Land Rover and Marks and Spencer having previously targeted.
The Guardian reports that these attacks have risen by 50 per cent in the past year.
In this instance, however, it appears to have been a technical error rather than the result of anything intentional.
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The root cause of the issue appears to be related to the Domain Name System (DNS), which is often referred to as the 'phone book of the internet.'
When you type in a simple website name into your browser, like www.ladbible.com, DNS will direct you to the address where the website can be found.
However, DNS resolution issues can take place when DNS servers aren't accurately connecting the dots, meaning if you were to type the LADbible website address into your browser, it was unable to locate the website.
AWS has been providing updates on the situation all day, however, unless you speak tech lingo, there's a good chance the updates will have left you feeling even less informed than before.
They said that the incident occurred at their data centre in North Virginia, which is one of their biggest and oldest sites, the BBC reports.
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"Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1," one update to its service health dashboard said, before later adding: "If you are still experiencing an issue resolving the DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1, we recommend flushing your DNS caches."
In their latest update, they said 'the root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers', and that they 'have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem'.
In coming days and weeks, once AWS has time to recover from the fallout of the mass outage, they'll likely to be able to provide more detail about exactly what went wrong, but for now, websites and apps are doing their best to get back to business as usual.