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Amazon Says DynamoDB DNS Bug Caused Oct. 20 AWS Outage

Reliance on the US‑EAST‑1 hub turned a single service fault into widespread downtime across apps and payments.

Overview

  • AWS reports a bug in DynamoDB’s DNS system in US‑EAST‑1 created an invalid empty record that blocked endpoint resolution and required manual intervention.
  • The disruption lasted roughly 15–16 hours and cascaded across thousands of services worldwide, with Brazilian platforms such as PicPay, MercadoPago, iFood and Mercado Livre among those affected.
  • EC2 in the same region struggled to start new instances during the incident, compounding recovery for workloads that needed additional capacity.
  • Analyst tallies place AWS near one‑third of the global cloud market, including 37% per Gartner and 30% per Synergy Research, heightening systemic impact when core services fail.
  • Recent guidance from coverage urges redundancy across multiple cloud providers, stronger continuity plans and using financial services with alternative systems to reduce future exposure.