Cause of Amazon's prolonged cloud outage unknown; experts compare impact to coordinated cyber attack

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has yet to provide clarity on what caused its 16-hour-long global outage on Oct 20, which affected users in Singapore trying to access Zoom and Canva, among other services.

- Anjali Raguraman Correspondent

But experts have already compared the impact of such a massive outage to a coordinated cyber attack, and highlighted issues with an overreliance on old technologies.

AWS said on its website that the problem was linked to domain name system (DNS) "resolution issues" which provide real-time system performance updates.

DNS is like a phone book of the internet that matches domain names, such as those in website addresses, to internet protocol addresses, which are strings of numbers that identify devices on the internet.

When probed on whether the problem was due to hardware error, incorrect configuration, human error or a cyber attack, a spokesperson said a detailed post-event summary would be shared, but no timeline was provided.

"We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-East-1 region," the spokesperson said.

The outage affected hundreds of online services globally, including those of banks and airlines overseas, online games like Roblox and Fortnite, and popular apps such as Snapchat and Reddit.