DNS issue at Amazon takes out major apps and sites
Amazon’s AWS cloud platform has been suffering major outages for the last few hours, taking huge chunks of the internet with it, and DNS resolution is being blamed.
Affected products and services reportedly include Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Delta Air Lines, Duolingo, Signal, Reddit, Amazon’s own Ring doorbell cam service, as well as the UK tax authority and various UK banks.
Amazon first reported problems on its status page at 0711 UTC this morning. By 0901 UTC, the company had narrowed the problem down, saying it “appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.”
DynamoDB is a cloud-based database service Amazon offers on AWS. US-EAST-1 is an Amazon regional data center cluster.
Twenty minutes later, Amazon began to report “early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services”. Not long after, it said the recovery signs were “significant”.
At 1035 UTC Amazon said: “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.”
AWS underpins hundreds of top-level domains — notably, Identity Digital built its registry platform there — but there’s no word yet on any DNS or EPP issues from any registries.
.es and .pt riding out massive power outage
A lesson in the importance of redundancy in your DNS architecture?
The ccTLDs for Spain and Portugal seem to be largely unaffected by an ongoing power cut that has seen both countries go into blackout (metaphorically) for the last several hours.
At time of writing, no explanation for the outage, which has also affected parts of France, has been given by authorities. Traffic lights, public transport, airports, radio stations and telecommunications networks have all reportedly been affected.
But .es and .pt domains appear to be resolving just fine, at least from where I’m sitting.
Both registries — DNS.pt and Red.es — have DNS resolution services distributed across multiple nameservers managed by multiple providers in multiple global locations.
As well as at home in Lisbon, .pt’s nameservers can be found as far afield as California and Brazil through partners Packet Clearing House and Nic.br. Red.es also uses PCH in California, though its remaining nodes are in Madrid.
Any data center worth a damn has an uninterruptable power supply and backup generators, so one assumes the local DNS nodes are up and running too.
DNS.pt has posted a notice on its web site saying that customer services are currently unavailable due to “circumstances beyond our control”.
It’s not clear if other registry systems have been affected by the outage, but presumably with a total lack of electricity registrants have more pressing things to worry about, like how to get home from work and whether the food in their freezers will be edible when they get there.
DNSSEC claims another ccTLD victim
A botched DNSSEC upgrade has been fingered as the source of an outage that made .na domain names inaccessible last Tuesday.
Reports and archived DNS records show that names in the Namibian ccTLD suffered as many as 12 hours of downtime following the glitch, which has been blamed on human error.
When DNSSEC-signed domains, including TLDs, are unable to establish a cryptographic chain of trust, anyone using a DNSSEC-compatible resolver will be unable to access web sites or emails of affected domains.
Namibian Network Information Center boss Eberhard Lisse, talking to The Namibian newspaper, blamed the downtime on an unspecified upstream provider pushing an algorithm upgrade “without all prerequisite steps having been completed”.
It’s the second DNSSEC incident to hit .na following a July 2019 glitch, and one of dozens to affect TLDs since the technology started to become more broadly adopted.
ZoneEdit offline for five days
The Dotster-owned DNS service provider ZoneEdit this morning returned from an unexplained five-day outage that has left many users extremely miffed.
The interruption affected only ZoneEdit’s management interface, not its DNS resolution, so it only affected customers who needed to make changes to their zones.
Users first started reporting they couldn’t access their accounts on Friday.
I’ve reported the story for The Register here.








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