Overview
- AWS said a latent race condition in DynamoDB’s automated DNS management created an empty us‑east‑1 regional record, breaking connections to the service.
- The automation failed to self‑repair and engineers performed manual intervention, after which AWS shut off the DynamoDB DNS planner and enactor globally.
- Amazon outlined mitigations including new protective checks, throttling improvements, and an additional test suite before re‑enabling the automation.
- Downdetector reported over 16 million user outage reports affecting more than 2,000 services in 60+ countries, with platforms from Snapchat and Disney+ to Lloyds Bank and Reddit disrupted.
- Recovery times varied widely as some systems failed over within minutes while others were degraded for hours, fueling calls for greater cloud resilience and scrutiny of reliance on a few providers.