Why were all websites down? What happened to AWS today?

If you were hopelessly trying to access your favorite internet site today and the services simply wouldn't load or had forgotten your data, you are not alone. Due to a massive Amazon Web Services outage temporarily bringing down many popular internet services, the masses became outraged.

All news here on The Zeitgeist:

AWS, a cloud computing provider, plays an important role in running the sites of many of the world’s most-used online services, such as Amazon, Disney+, Fortnite or McDonalds. In the early years of Amazon, the e-commerce plattform required excess server capacity to ensure it had enough computing power to handle the massive amounts of traffic that came to its site during the holiday season rush. Soon they realized that during the rest of the year, the spare servers could be used to support other companies’ online needs, and out of that AWS was born.

Among the countless offerings of AWS is DynamoDB, a database that hosts information for companies, such as customer data. As Amazon Monday reported, their customers were not able to access the data stored in DynamoDB, because the Domain Name System (DNS) encountered an unknown problem. The DNS is crucial for websites, as it converts simple domain names into IP adressess, a series of numbers that other websites and applications can understand.

“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data,” said Mike Chapple at University of Notre Dame. “It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”

Due to the outage, the sites of a lot of prominent companys were down, but most were up and running by the evening. The Zeitgeist has got a list for you:

• Canva

• Delta Air Lines

• Disney +

• Fortnite

• Hulu

• McDonald’s

• Pokemon

• Roblox

• Snapchat

• United Airlines

A cloud sharing company boss says today is a "bad day" for Amazon.

Matthew Prince's business Cloudflare uses cloud-based software to help websites and apps connect and remain secure.

Speaking to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Radio 4, Prince says that although there are "amazing things" about relying on cloud sharing technology, "if you have an outage like this it can take down a lot of services we rely on."

“Some of the companies were able to stay online, but that comes with complexity and cost and not everyone makes those decisions," he adds.

Ultimately though, Prince says, today's Amazon outage "is not a big deal".

Instead, the tech boss says he's worried about "governments intentionally taking the internet offline".

"If that gets normalised that's a bigger risk to the internet," he explains.