Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts Major Apps Including Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Perplexity Across Global Users

Tech News: The sudden outage of Amazon Web Services affected not only Amazon services but also numerous apps. However, the company has now fixed the issue and restored service. The outage in Amazon's cloud services disrupted apps and websites offering banking, gaming platforms, and entertainment services. With the restoration of service, the reason behind the outage has also been revealed.

Reason Behind Amazon Web Outage

The problem began after a technical update to an API at AWS's oldest and largest site data center, located in Virginia, US. The service outage appears to have been caused by an error in the update that affected the Domain Name System (DNS), which helps apps find the correct server addresses. DNS acts like the internet's phone book, converting website names into numerical IP addresses that are used to connect to computer servers.

Due to a DNS issue, apps couldn't find the IP address of DynamoDB's API, causing connection problems. As DynamoDB went down, other AWS services also began to crash. In total, 113 services were affected by the Amazon Web Services outage.

Other Platforms Also Got Affected

The AWS outage caused outages for Amazon, Snapchat, Alexa, ChatGPT, Fortnite, Epic Online Services, and the Epic Games Store. Some affected platforms, including Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, and Perplexity, reported full service recovery, while others were still experiencing issues.

What is AWS?

AWS is used to provide on-demand cloud computing services, such as storage and databases, over the Internet. This allows businesses around the world to build and run their own applications without having to build their own physical servers. Amazon Web Services offers a wide range of services, including web hosting, mobile apps, enterprise applications, analytics, and machine learning.