After a major outage occuring the night and early morning of October 19-20, Amazon Web Services has returned to almost full capacity as of 3:53 p.m. PDT. Chabot students should have access to Instructure’s Canvas service as of 4:45 p.m. after an outage of more than 16 hours.
On being unable to access Canvas, biology major Matthew said, “I was actually midway through turning in an essay when it went down, so I’m glad that it’s up now.” On the other hand, business major Vinicius claimed, “I did notice Canvas was down, but luckily I was prepared and didn’t have anything due.”
A status update by Amazon’s AWS Health website stated, “Between 11:49 PM PDT on October 19 and 2:24 AM PDT on October 20, we experienced increased error rates and latencies for AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Additionally, services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM and DynamoDB Global Tables also experienced issues during this time. At 12:26 AM on October 20, we identified the trigger of the event as DNS resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints.”
In layman’s terms, this essentially means that due to an error affecting Amazon’s US-EAST-1 Data Center Cluster spreading across Northern Virginia (The largest and most traffic intensive cluster in AWS’s repertoire), essential services like Amazon’s Identity Access Management (IAS) and DynamoDB were unable to be used.
IAS is used to control and verify users’ identity, and certify what permissions they have to make changes to. DynamoDb is Amazon’s high-speed Cloud Database and due to Domain Name System (DNS) issues that don’t allow websites and services to convert domain names into IP addresses. As a result, any AWS service or customer application that relied on DynamoDB in that region couldn’t even find where to connect.
Due To this outage approximately 76 million websites and services were either partially or fully inaccessible from payment processors such as Venmo, Chime, and Coinbase, to gaming servers including Fortnite and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. Other outages included communication services like Lyft, Adobe’s Creative Cloud,Canvas, and Snapchat.
Outage duration for separate services have differed since Amazon had fully mitigated the DNS issues at approximately 3 a.m. and as of the writing of this article, most services are now fully accessible.
