Diwali Blackout: How the AWS Outage Crippled Major Apps Across the World

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major outage on Monday, October 20, impacting thousands of websites and users worldwide. The outage coincided with the day India was celebrating the festival of Diwali, resulting in several online businesses suffering disruptions while running Diwali-specific promotions and campaigns. As per an outage tracker, AWS was down for nearly 12 hours, although some services went back online earlier than others. Some of the major platforms that suffered an outage due to the disruption include Apple TV, Canva, Fortnite, Reddit, Snapchat, and Starbucks, as well as several government agencies.

What Happened During the AWS Outage

According to the Internet outage monitor Downdetector, users of the platform began reporting issues with AWS services starting at 4am ET (1:30pm IST) on October 20. The reports peaked at 8am ET (5:30pm IST) with more than 13,000 users impacted by the outage. Users kept mass reporting the outage till 2pm ET (11:30 pm IST).

Since AWS is a major cloud service provider for a large number of platforms and websites, the outage resulted in websites and apps such as Apple TV, Canva, Fire TV, Fortnite, Hulu, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, and Starbucks also facing issues. For instance, Fire TV services were not able to connect to the server, and users could not play any content on their smart TVs.

Due to its far-reaching impacts across major corporations and government-led agencies, it is considered the largest Internet outage since the Crowdstrike incident that took down Microsoft services among others last year. The full extent of the financial impact of the outage is currently not known.

The outage also led to discussion on the downside of a single company controlling the access to the Internet for so many major websites. Billionaire and X CTO Elon Musk was quick to point to the fact that Signal, a privacy-focused instant messaging platform, also went down due to the AWS outage, questioning its reliability. He also took the opportunity to promote his X Chat.

What Caused the AWS Outage

On its Service Health status page, AWS highlighted that during the preliminary analysis, it found that the event was triggered due to a “Domain Name System (DNS) resolution issue for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints”, which led to increased error rates and latencies for its services in the US-East-1 Region. The issue led to a subsequent “impairment in the internal subsystem of EC2, which led to the Network Load Balancer health checks also becoming impaired.

The cascading chain of events led to the massive system failure, which took AWS nearly 12 hours to fix. AWS said it will share a detailed post-event summary in the coming days.