At 12:11 a.m. PDT on Oct. 20, Amazon’s web services experienced a countrywide outage and restricted many major platforms from working. Some of these platforms included Snapchat, Life360, Facebook, and many others. Blackman sophomore Elias Gonzalez-Campos said, “Didn’t affect me,” when asked how the outage affected him.
The outage was caused by three main issues. One of these issues was the DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-East Region and solved between 12:11 a.m. PST to 3:35 a.m. PST. Amazon Dynamo DB is a serverless, NoSQL, fully managed database with single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. The endpoint ensures that requests are routed to the correct AWS region. If a request is not routed to the correct location, then you will get an error message.
From 3:35 a.m. PST to 11:22 a.m. PST, another issue came to their attention during the outage, and it was the increased error rates on request to launch new EC2 instances. EC2 instances are virtual servers that provide scalable computing capacity and run applications without investing in physical hardware.
Lastly, from 4:08 a.m. PST to 1:03 p.m. PST, elevated polling delays for Lambda, specifically the Lambda Event Source Mapping for SQS, was one of the issues contributing to the outage. Lambda is a serverless compute service provided by AWS and allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers. A Lambda Event Sourcing Mapping is a feature that Lambda offers that creates an automated connection between an SQS queue and a Lambda function.
The outage impacted mostly the U.S. Eastern Region and the event lasted from Oct. 20, 12:11 a.m. PST to 1:03 p.m. PST. It was caused by three issues including DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint, increased polling rates on launching EC2 instances, and Lambda Event Sourcing Mapping for SQS.
Sophomore Jorge Poleo Leon said, “It didn’t affect me…the Wi-Fi was being funky.”
This event affected millions of lives and proved the importance of what phones have in our lives.
