Technologies

An AWS Outage Broke the Internet While You Were Sleeping

Reddit, Roblox and Ring are just a tiny fraction of the 1,000-plus sites and services that were affected when Amazon Web Services went down, causing a major internet blackout.

The internet kicked off the week the way that many of us often feel like doing: by refusing to go to work. An outage at Amazon Web Services rendered huge portions of the internet unavailable on Monday morning, with sites and services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, the PlayStation Network and, predictably, Amazon, unavailable for a short period of time.

The outage began shortly after midnight PT, and took Amazon around 3.5 hours to fully resolve. Social networks and streaming services were among the 1,000-plus companies affected, and critical services such as online banking were also taken down. You’ll likely find most sites and services functioning as usual this morning, but some knock-on effects will probably be seen throughout the day.

AWS, a cloud services provider owned by Amazon, props up huge portions of the internet. So when it went down, it took many of the services we know and love with it. As with the Fastly and Crowdstrike outages over the past few years, the AWS outage shows just how much of the internet relies on the same infrastructure — and how quickly our access to the sites and services we rely on can be revoked when something goes wrong. The reliance on a small number of big companies to underpin the web is akin to putting all of our eggs in a tiny handful of baskets.

When it works, it’s great, but only one small thing needs to go wrong for the internet to come to its knees in a matter of minutes.

How widespread was the AWS outage?

Just after midnight PT on October 20, AWS first registered an issue on its service status page, saying it was «investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.» Around 2 a.m. PT, it said it had identified a potential root cause of the issue, and within half an hour, it had started applying mitigations that were resulting in significant signs of recovery.

«The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,» AWS said at 3.35 a.m. PT. The company didn’t respond to request for further comment beyond pointing us back to the AWS health dashboard.

Around the time that AWS says it first began noticing error rates, Downdetector saw reports begin to spike across many online services, including banks, airlines and phone carriers. As AWS resolved the issue, some of these reports saw a drop off, whereas others have yet to return to normal. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Ring, Verizon and YouTube were still seeing a significant number of reported issues. Reddit finally came back online around 4.30 a.m. PT, according to its status page, which was then verified by us.

In total, Downdetector saw over 6.5 million reports, with 1.4 million coming from the US, 800,000 from the UK and the rest largely spread across Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Over 1,000 companies in total have been affected, Downdetector added.

«This kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swathe of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year,» Daniel Ramirez, Downdetector by Ookla’s director of product told CNET. «They probably are becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services and their data architectures are designed to make the most out of a particular cloud platform.»

What caused the AWS Outage?

AWS hasn’t shared full details about what caused the internet to fall off a cliff this morning. The likelihood is that now it’s deployed a fix, its next step will be to investigate what went wrong.

So far it’s attributed the outage to a «DNS issue.» DNS stands for the Domain Name System and refers to the service that translates human-readable internet addresses (for example, CNET.com) into machine-readable IP addresses that connects browsers with websites.

When a DNS error occurs, the translation process cannot take place, interrupting the connection. DNS errors are common are common internet roadblocks, but usually happen on small scale, affecting individual sites or services. But because the use of AWS is so widespread, a DNS error can have equally widespread results.

According to Amazon, the issue is geographically rooted in its US-EAST-1 region, which refers to an area of North Virginia where many of its data centers are based. It’s a significant location for Amazon, as well as many other internet companies, and it props up services spanning the US and Europe.

«The lesson here is resilience,» said Luke Kehoe, industry analyst at Ookla. «Many organizations still concentrate critical workloads in a single cloud region. Distributing critical apps and data across multiple regions and availability zones can materially reduce the blast radius of future incidents.»

Was the AWS Outage caused by a cyberattack?

DNS issues can be caused by malicious actors, but there’s no evidence at this stage to say that this is the case for the AWS outage.

Technical faults can, however, pave the way for hackers to look for and exploit vulnerabilities when companies’ backs are turned and defenses are down, according to Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN. «This is a cybersecurity issue as much as a technical one,» he said in a statement. «True online security isn’t only about keeping hackers out, it’s also about ensuring you can stay connected and protected when systems fail.»

In the hours ahead, people should look out for scammers hoping to take advantage of people’s awareness of the outage, added Briedis. You should be extra wary of phishing attacks and emails telling you to change your password to protect your account.

Technologies

Google races to put Gemini at the center of Android before Apple’s AI reboot

Google is using its latest Android rollout to position Gemini as the AI layer across phones, Chrome, laptops and cars.

Google is using its latest Android rollout to make Gemini less of a chatbot and more of an operating layer across the phone, browser, car and laptop, just weeks before Apple is expected to show its own Gemini-powered Apple Intelligence reboot at WWDC.
Ahead of its Google I/O developer conference next week, the company previewed a number of Android updates, including AI-powered app automation, a smarter version of Chrome on Android, new tools for creators, a redesigned Android Auto experience, and a sweeping set of new security features.
Alphabet is counting on Gemini to help Google compete directly with OpenAI and Anthropic in the market for artificial intelligence models and services, while also serving as the AI backbone across its expansive portfolio of products, including Android. Meanwhile, Gemini is powering part of Apple’s new AI strategy, giving Google a role in the iPhone maker’s reset even as it races to prove its own version of personal AI on the phone is further along.
Sameer Samat, who oversees Google’s Android ecosystem, told CNBC that Google is rebuilding parts of Android around Gemini Intelligence to help users complete everyday tasks more easily.
“We’re transitioning from an operating system to an intelligence system,” he said.
As part of Tuesday’s announcements. Google said Gemini Intelligence will be able to move across apps, understand what’s on the screen and complete tasks that would normally require a user to jump between multiple services. That means Android is moving beyond the traditional assistant model, where users ask a question and get an answer, and acting more like an agent.
For instance, Google says Gemini can pull relevant information from Gmail, build shopping carts and book reservations. Samat gave the example of asking Gemini to look at the guest list for a barbecue, build a menu, add ingredients to an Instacart list and return for approval before checkout.
A big concern surrounding agentic AI involves software taking action on a user’s behalf without permissions. Samat said Gemini will come back to the user before completing a transaction, adding, “the human is always in the loop.”
Four months after announcing its Gemini deal with Google, Apple is under pressure to show a more capable version of Apple Intelligence, which has been a relative laggard on the market. Apple has long framed privacy, hardware integration and control of the user experience as its advantages.
Google’s Android push is designed to show it can bring AI deeper into the device experience while still giving users control over what Gemini can see, where it can act and when it needs confirmation.
The app automation features will roll out in waves, starting with the latest Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones this summer, before expanding across more Android devices, including watches, cars, glasses and laptops later this year.
The company is also redesigning Android Auto around Gemini, turning the car into another major surface for its assistant. Android Auto is in more than 250 million cars, and Google says the new release includes its biggest maps update in a decade and Gemini-powered help with tasks like ordering dinner while driving.
Alphabet’s AI strategy has been embraced by Wall Street, which has pushed the company’s stock price up more than 140% in the past year, compared to Apple’s roughly 40% gain. Investors now want to see how Gemini can become more central to the products people use every day.
WATCH: Alphabet briefly tops Nvidia after report of $200 billion Anthropic cloud deal

Technologies

Waymo recalls 3,800 robotaxis after glitch allowed some vehicles to ‘drive into standing water’

Waymo issued a voluntary recall of about 3,800 of its robotaxis to fix software issues that could allow them to drive into flooded roadways.

Waymo is recalling about 3,800 robotaxis in the U.S. to fix software issues that could allow them to “drive onto a flooded roadway,” according to a letter on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website.
The voluntary recall is for Waymo vehicles that use the company’s fifth and sixth generation automated driving systems (or ADS), the U.S. auto safety regulator said in the letter posted Tuesday.
Waymo autonomous vehicles in Austin, Texas, were seen on camera driving onto a flooded street and stalling, requiring other drivers to navigate around them. It’s the latest example of a safety-related issue for the Alphabet-owned AV unit that’s rapidly bolstering its fleet of vehicles and entering new U.S. markets.
Waymo has drawn criticism for its vehicles failing to yield to school buses in Austin, and for the performance of its vehicles during widespread power outages in San Francisco in December, when robotaxis halted in traffic, causing gridlock.
The company said in a statement on Tuesday that it’s “identified an area of improvement regarding untraversable flooded lanes specific to higher-speed roadways,” and opted to file a “voluntary software recall” with the NHTSA.
“Waymo provides over half a million trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments across the U.S., and safety is our primary priority,” the company said.
Waymo added that it’s working on “additional software safeguards” and has put “mitigations” in place, limiting where its robotaxis operate during extreme weather, so that they avoid “areas where flash flooding might occur” in periods of intense rain.
WATCH: Waymo launches new autonomous system in Chinese-made vehicle

Technologies

Qualcomm tumbles 13% as semiconductor stocks retreat from historic AI-fueled surge

Semiconductor equities reversed sharply after a broad AI-driven advance, with Qualcomm suffering its worst day since 2020 amid inflation concerns and rising oil prices.

Semiconductor stocks fell sharply on Tuesday, reversing course after an extensive rally that had expanded the artificial intelligence investment theme well past Nvidia and driven the industry to unprecedented levels.

Qualcomm plunged 13% and was on track for its steepest single-day decline since 2020. Intel shed 8%, while On Semiconductor and Skyworks Solutions each lost more than 6%. The iShares Semiconductor ETF, which benchmarks the overall sector, fell 5%.

The sell-off came after a key gauge of consumer prices came in above forecasts, and as conflict in Iran pushed crude oil higher—prompting investors to shift away from riskier assets.

The preceding advance had widened the AI opportunity set beyond longtime industry leader Nvidia, which for much of the past several years had largely carried the market to new peaks on its own.

Explosive appetite for central processing units, along with the graphics processing units that power large language models, has sent chipmakers to all-time highs.

Market participants are wagering that the shift from AI model training to autonomous agents will lift demand for additional AI hardware. Among the beneficiaries are memory chip producers, which are raising prices as supply remains tight.

Micron Technology slid 6%, and Sandisk cratered 8%. Sandisk’s stock has surged more than six times over since January.