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Internet The one-hour outage on Monday caused many of the world’s biggest apps and services to shut down.
Snapchat, Slack, Fortnite, and Roblox all went offline during the technical issues, which started early in the morning and continued throughout the day.
Soon after it started, the problem was detected Amazon Web Services There appear to be some issues with the (AWS) feature. The company said the problems were related to a data center in Northern Virginia and that the problem was with the domain name system, which acts as the Internet’s phone book.
AWS provides much of the Internet’s infrastructure, meaning that even a relatively small technical problem can destroy larger platforms that may not be explicitly linked to Amazon. It is the largest company of its kind.
About three hours after the problems began, Amazon said it had determined the root cause of the problem and implemented a fix. But it took some time to implement due to the vast and interconnected nature of the Internet.
According to tracking website Down Detector, Snapchat, Reddit, Duolingo, Roblox, Amazon Prime Video and others were all offline or not functioning properly for hours.
Professor Olly Buckley, an expert in cyber security at Loughborough University, said DNS is “essentially a phone book for the internet, it tells devices where to go to find a particular service”.
He added: “When that happens it impacts thousands of systems that rely on it, and they can’t get to the right server.
“Ultimately this means they slow down when they try to figure it out, and eventually stop trying.”
Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN, said the outage “highlighted a serious issue with how some of the world’s largest companies often rely on the same digital infrastructure, meaning that when one domino falls, so do they all”.
Mr Briedis said: “From streaming services to online banking, much of our digital lives depend on just a few cloud providers. Although Amazon Web Services may already have had technical glitches found, it still provides a prime opportunity for hackers to seek vulnerabilities while reducing security for affected companies.
“Over the coming hours, as AWS works to fix the issue, keep an eye out for possible phishing emails or messages that try to trick you into clicking a malicious link or ask you to urgently change your details to protect your account. These may be an attempt to infect your device with malware or steal your data.”