A major Amazon Web Services outage caused widespread disruptions across social media, gaming, finance, and other online platforms in the U.S. and Europe. Amazon says the hours-long problem was traced to one cloud server, highlighting AWS’s vast role in powering the internet.

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A technical failure at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in Northern Virginia led to significant disruptions across social media, gaming, financial brokerages, and other online platforms for millions of users in the U.S. and Western Europe. Amazon identified the issue as a routing problem within its cloud-based services, which was detected and resolved within hours.

Cybersecurity experts noted that while the outage was not linked to malicious activity, it underscores both the resilience and fragility of the current digital infrastructure. The incident highlights the risks associated with heavy reliance on a small number of major cloud providers, as disruptions can have widespread effects across various sectors. Experts suggest that organizations may need to reconsider their dependency on single cloud services to improve resilience against future outages.

Why an Amazon Web Services outage disrupts so much of the internet

Millions of Internet users in the U.S. and Western Europe woke up to a massive disruption to social media, gaming, financial brokerages, and other online sites. Amazon says they isolated the problem, which lasted for hours, to one of its cloud-based Internet services. The outage highlights the vulnerabilities of the global online infrastructure. So for tonight's interview, we are joined by CBS' cybersecurity expert and analyst, Chris Krebs. So Chris, what the heck happened here? Well, as you can imagine, Amazon Web Services, as one of the largest cloud service providers in the entire world, and really the top three, has a very complex distributed system. And what happened here in the Northern Virginia data center is that they just had a technical failure. They had a routing problem, tasking some of their services to look for the right addresses, and they just got it wrong. It was detected fairly quickly, and it was even resolved in a fairly quick manner as well. So this is about what you should expect these days, I think, in terms of cloud outages, as it were. So you know all about mischief makers and foreign actors and all of that. Can we rule them out in this case? Look, AWS is saying that it's a technical failure. All available information suggests the same. And like I said, this is about what you would expect in a technical failure. It doesn't mean, though, that bad guys aren't poking around and trying to get into various cloud providers and bring them down. We've seen them go after Microsoft. There was a great report out of DHS and the Cyber Safety Review Board even a few years ago. But for now, it's technical, and it does show, I think, the resilience of the system. It fell down. They caught it. They pulled it back up pretty quickly. Let me take the opposite view. If it shows the resilience, does it also show our dependence on a single cloud server or these big ones? And therefore, is that a national security challenge? Absolutely shows both the fragility of these systems as well as our continued kind of figuring out how we live with these systems in an almost entirely digital economy. Just like last summer when CrowdStrike had an outage in July that took airlines offline, we're finding out that too many of these services that companies use, there's a single point of failure. So I think there's going to be a lot of learning from this moment. There's going to be some resilience that's baked into companies. And I think also that Amazon, who I frankly did a fairly good job of popping back up, is probably going to take a little bit harder look at some of the things they do on testing pre-release. Chris, will you give us a very simple explanation of exactly what's going on here and why so many different kinds of institutions and organizations were caught up in this momentary failure? Yeah, look, AWS is up there with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in terms of the three largest hyperscale cloud providers in the world. So let's just say a third of the market. It's not really a third, but let's just say a third of cloud services are provided by AWS. It still costs money to bring these services on, and so you're probably not going to diversify or have redundant failover systems. So if your single point of failure is AWS, and it goes offline for a couple hours, then you're going to be offline too. So much now resolves down to cloud dependencies, and it really is, to your earlier point about national security concerns, how much we're putting into the cloud, how much we're putting onto digital services, it really does create these concentrated risks that are going to continue to cascade out into the future. CBS's cybersecurity expert, Chris Krabs. Thanks so much, Chris.

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