AWS Outage Disrupts Netflix, Spotify, and Slack: Incident Details and Cybersecurity Risks
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outage in December 2021: Causes and Repercussions
Many major websites and applications experienced a significant Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on December 7, 2021, with the impact lasting for almost an entire day. AWS later revealed additional details about the cause of this outage.
The Root Cause of the Outage
Cause of the Outage: The incident resulted from a major failure in the AWS US-East-1 region. A problem with the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundational system that translates domain names into numerical IP addresses, prevented services from accessing the DynamoDB API. DynamoDB is used for databases requiring low latency and high throughput, such as gaming, IoT, and e-commerce applications. Consequently, an internal EC2 subsystem crashed due to its close reliance on DynamoDB, leading to further delays and exacerbating the issue.
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Beginning of Recovery: According to Amazon's status page, after the DynamoDB DNS issue was resolved, services gradually began to recover. However, a subsequent failure occurred in the internal EC2 subsystem responsible for launching EC2 instances due to its close reliance on DynamoDB.
Service Restoration: A gradual approach was followed to restore systems after Amazon fixed the initial issue. By 3:01 PM PST, approximately half a day after the outage began, AWS had fully recovered. However, some services, such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect, continued processing a backlog of messages, which they finished handling over the next few hours.
Repercussions and Impact of the Outage
Cyber Risks
Cybercriminals exploit panic during outages to launch their malicious attacks. It is advised to avoid clicking on suspicious links.
Financial Losses
Losses were estimated at millions of dollars for major companies like Netflix and Spotify due to service disruptions and their reliance on AWS.
Cyber Risks: Stephanie Chapert, Senior Journalist at Cybernews, described the hours-long outage as a "perfect storm" for cyberattacks. She explained that criminals often exploit widespread panic to push their malicious campaigns with a sense of urgency. Chapert emphasized that during major internet service outages, users should avoid clicking on any links in emails, texts, or pop-ups claiming to fix the outage or offer quick solutions.
Financial Losses: With AWS customers directly affected by the outage for approximately 70 minutes, DesignRush estimated that services like Netflix and Spotify may have lost $4.5 million and $2 million in revenue, respectively, due to this disruption. The Slack outage might also have cost its parent company, Salesforce, $1.13 million. Anonta Khan from DesignRush noted that when more than half of Fortune 500 companies rely on the same cloud provider, any single disruption can resonate throughout the global economy and cause significant losses.
Additional Source
Check out the additional source for more details.
Additional Source: To learn more about the details of the outage that occurred on December 7, 2021, you can visit Reuters' report on the Amazon cloud service outage.
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