Major internet outage impacts websites and apps around the world

Natus Videre

Natus Videre

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
outage.png


When the coffee machine displays "Connection lost. Please try again later," something must have went terribly wrong...
A trial run for the PTB just to stir the cup or... a Cappuccino brewed by Mother Earth?
 
It was caused by an outage at Fastly, a CDN provider like Akamai and Cloudflare. It does look like something that would happen due to DDOS or an internal systems compromise - possibly a fallout from Solarwinds compromise a few months ago. I am waiting to see more information being released. Very interesting though.
 
bjorn said:
Oh wow. A major hack attack during the summer. Just as Klaus Schwab, the Dark Lord of the Great Reset predicted.

Now, cybersecurity is going to become a talking point during the upcoming G7.
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Almost like Herr Schwab can look into the future, eh? However, the massive brainwashing machine is absolutely dependent on the net. Our rulers will only turn it on and off, for short while, to scare people into compliance. They need to feed us their lies.
 
Victor Pigeon said:
Almost like Herr Schwab can look into the future, eh? However, the massive brainwashing machine is absolutely dependent on the net. Our rulers will only turn it on and off, for short while, to scare people into compliance. They need to feed us their lies.
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Yeah. There's no intention of deactivating it entirely.

However, they do have the problem that it's a double edged sword: a powerful propaganda/surveillance tool on the one hand, but an equally potent deprogramming tool on the other.

My guess is they want to blunt one of the edges, by removing anonymity, and putting in place systems to censor everything they don't like.

Whether they can succeed with that, on the other hand....
 
Well, according to the below press release, it was a software bug which caused the issue, not a cyberattack. Or, at least that’s what they are saying.
www.theregister.com

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Promises it won't happen again, expresses remorse … all the usual stuff that clouds (and Zuck) say after they stumble around making messes
www.theregister.com www.theregister.com
Fastly has explained how it managed to black-hole big chunks of the internet yesterday: a customer triggered a bug.

The customer, Fastly points out in a post titled Summary of June 8 outage, was blameless. "We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change," wrote Nick Rockwell, the company's senior veep of engineering and infrastructure.

The bug was introduced in a 12 May software deployment and lay dormant until, on 8 June, "a customer pushed a valid configuration change that included the specific circumstances that triggered the bug, which caused 85 per cent of our network to return errors."


Cue global chaos.

Rockwell's post states that Fastly "detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95 per cent of our network was operating as normal."
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The veep also admitted that Fastly should have done better.

"Even though there were specific conditions that triggered this outage, we should have anticipated it," he wrote.

The company has therefore resolved to do four things:

  • We're deploying the bug fix across our network as quickly and safely as possible.
  • We are conducting a complete post mortem of the processes and practices we followed during this incident.
  • We'll figure out why we didn't detect the bug during our software quality assurance and testing processes.
  • We'll evaluate ways to improve our remediation time.
And, of course, it has apologised and promised it will do its very best not to make mistakes like this again. Which is just what all clouds, and social networks, say when they make avoidable but very damaging errors. ®
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Seens like it's happening again.

Yesterday youtube, today websites like webull amazon banking etc.

Appears the problem is with amazon servesrs and websites that use their servers/services. But could be more than that.

www.dailymail.co.uk

'Half the internet' goes down after Amazon cloud outage

An outage has taken down hundreds of popular websites including Snapchat, gaming platform Fortnite and languages app Duolingo.
www.dailymail.co.uk www.dailymail.co.uk
 
It looks AWS North Eastern region center had issues and many of the corporate systems were down. There had been consistent push to move to cloud providers (for cheaper services, storage and for almost all needs) for the last 15 years. It picked up traction during the last 5 years and many companies moved all their hardware and services to cloud providers like AWS. you only have 3 big providers in that space and AWS is the largest one. More the latest the applications are, more the dependency. We are not talking about individual users here, we talking about the corporate applications that service millions of their customers.

www.reuters.com

Amazon's AWS struggles to recover after major outage disrupts apps, services worldwide

Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps - Snapchat and Reddit - and disrupted businesses globally.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

Oct 20 (Reuters) - Amazon's (AMZN.O), opens new tab cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps - Snapchat and Reddit - and disrupted businesses globally.

The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.

After more than nine hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 1:00 p.m. ET (1700 GMT). But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several AWS services and that it was working on recovering connectivity.

AWS was down for more than 9,300 users as of 1:00 p.m. ET, according to outage tracking website Downdetector. That figure is higher than the earlier peak of about 5,800 reports at 3:48 a.m. ET.

Lambda, one of AWS's computing services, was experiencing errors due to issues with an internal subsystem, AWS said in an update on its status page. "We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system," it said.

AWS said earlier the root cause of the outage is an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers to ensure improved performance and capacity.

The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network."

EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required.
Steps to resolve EC2 system-related issues resulted in some early signs of recovery across a few data centers, AWS said in an update on its status page.

It is taking similar measures at the remaining locations and expects the problems to subside, AWS added, without providing a specific timeline.

While some apps like Reddit (RDDT.N), opens new tab and Roblox (RBLX.N), opens new tab had largely stabilized, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat (SNAP.N), opens new tab, PayPal's (PYPL.O), opens new tab Venmo and Duolingo (DUOL.O), opens new tab, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day.

ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES​

AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's (MSFT.O), opens new tab Azure and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google Cloud.

While some apps like Reddit (RDDT.N), opens new tab and Roblox (RBLX.N), opens new tab had largely stabilized, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat (SNAP.N), opens new tab, PayPal's (PYPL.O), opens new tab Venmo and Duolingo (DUOL.O), opens new tab, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day.

ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES​

AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's (MSFT.O), opens new tab Azure and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google Cloud.

1760994885449.png


Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms - ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems - that rely on its cloud infrastructure.

AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020.

According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.

Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

"FRAGILE INFRASTRUCTURES"​

The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said.

"This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures," said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET.

In Britain, Lloyd Bank (LLOY.L), opens new tab, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone (VOD.L), opens new tab and BT (BT.L), opens new tab were all hit, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website.

"The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science.

Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident.

"For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue," said Ryan Griffin, U.S. cyber practice leader at insurance broker McGill and Partners.

FROM SNAPCHAT TO VENMO: OUTAGE TAKES DOWN APPS

Ookla said at least a thousand companies were affected by the outage.

Snapchat last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances at around 7:00 a.m. ET.

Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN.O), opens new tab and trading app Robinhood (HOOD.O), opens new tab all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS.

Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity.

Fortnite, owned by Epic Games; Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber (UBER.N), opens new tab rival Lyft (LYFT.O), opens new tab was also knocked down in the United States.

In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work.

While there has been no indication of a potential cyberattack behind Monday's outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation.
"When anything like this happens, the concern that it's a cyber incident is understandable," said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos.

"AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset."
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And, this is why putting all eggs in the cloud basket is bad for corporates. More than half of the world's systems and data are in Microsoft, Amazon and Google clouds so, if anyone wants to cause a worldwide cyber incident, just attack one of these providers. The above may or may not be a cyber-attack but with the constant tech skill regression, the outcome is still the same, if there is a mis-click or incorrect deployment.
 
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