A Cascade of Failures: A Breakdown of the Massive AWS Outage

Somewhere tonight in northern Virginia, a group of AWS administrators are probably enjoying a beverage after a very long day of troubleshooting.

Amazon Web Services suffered a cascade of failures Monday across its US-EAST-1 Region, causing multiple outages across a dizzying array of cloud services, including AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Appflow, Amazon Aurora DSQL Service and others.

As it is all too often the case, the culprit was DNS misconfiguration. Go figure.

Of AWS’ 15 regions worldwide, US-EAST-1 is probably the largest,…