Washington: A massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday brought large parts of the internet to a halt. Apps, websites and online tools used by millions of people stopped working. The hours-long breakdown revealed how dependent modern life is on cloud infrastructure.

The outage began around 07:11 GMT at one of AWS’s main data centres in Virginia, the company’s oldest and largest site. A technical update to DynamoDB, a cloud database service, caused the problem. The update led to an error in the Domain Name System, which directs apps to the correct server addresses. Apps could no longer connect to DynamoDB’s Application Programming Interface (API).

As a result, other AWS services began failing. A total of 113 services were affected. By 10:11 GMT, Amazon reported that operations h

See Full Page