AWS US-EAST-1 DNS Failure Causes Global AWS Service Outage

A massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20 caused widespread disruptions across numerous online platforms including PUBG, Snapchat, Reddit, Amazon.com, and Prime Video, affecting millions globally. The root cause was a critical DNS failure linked to a latent race condition in the DNS management system of AWS's DynamoDB database service, which resulted in the accidental deletion of all IP addresses for the regional endpoint in the US-EAST-1 data center. This failure triggered cascading problems across AWS infrastructure, leaving many services unable to connect to DynamoDB and causing prolonged instability. The incident took about 15 hours to fully resolve and affected 142 AWS services, highlighting vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure and the internet's heavy reliance on centralized data centers. AWS has since disabled the faulty DNS automation, implemented protective checks, and improved testing to prevent recurrence. The outage underlined the critical importance of infrastructure redundancy and the interconnected nature of modern digital services.