Amazon has finally explained what caused the massive outage that took down a huge chunk of the internet on October 20th. In a detailed new report, the company blames a bug in one of its core automation systems, a problem that then cascaded and caused a widespread digital meltdown.
The problem started in a system called DynamoDB, which is where many of Amazon’s cloud customers store their data. According to Amazon, a bug in the system’s DNS management software caused a critical piece of information to go missing for its data centers in Northern Virginia. The system was supposed to fix this problem automatically, but it failed.
This seemingly small bug had a massive ripple effect. Because so many other systems rely on DynamoDB, they started failing too. It was like a digital house of cards, and when one piece fell, it brought everything else down with it. As Amazon scrambled to fix the problem manually, it felt like half the internet had gone dark.
The list of affected websites and services was staggering. It included major names like Snapchat, Reddit, and Disney+, as well as Amazon’s own services, such as Alexa. Banks, delivery apps, and popular games like Fortnite were also hit, with some being slow to respond and others being completely offline.
In a statement, Amazon apologized for the chaos, saying, “We know this event impacted many customers in significant ways. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.”
