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ZDNET's key takeaways
A major AWS outage disrupted global websites, apps, and services.
The issue stemmed from a DNS failure in AWS's US-East-1 region.
In the latest update, Amazon said the AWS outage was resolved.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the backbone of much of the internet, went dark early Monday morning. At approximately 12:11 a.m. ET on Oct. 20, it suffered a major outage, knocking out numerous websites, apps, and online platforms worldwide.
The disruption originated in the company's critical US-East-1 region in Northern Virginia, AWS's largest and most essential data hub. It took until 6:53 p.m. ET before the major issues were finally repaired. Even then, some downstream problems lingered.
Widespread slowdowns and timeouts
AWS first acknowledged the issue after it detected increased error rates and latency across numerous key services, including EC2, Lambda, and DynamoDB -- Amazon's cloud database technology. Engineers later identified a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem affecting the DynamoDB API endpoint, which cascaded across dependent systems.
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