A single point of failure triggered the Amazon outage affecting millions

The outage that hit Amazon Web Services and took out vital services worldwide was the result of a single failure that cascaded from system to system within Amazon’s sprawling network, according to a post-mortem from company engineers.

The series of failures lasted for 15 hours and 32 minutes, Amazon said. Network intelligence company Ookla said its DownDetector service received more than 17 million reports of disrupted services offered by 3,500 organizations.

The three biggest countries where reports originated were the US, the UK, and Germany. Snapchat, AWS, and Roblox were the most reported services affected. Ookla said the event was “among the largest internet outages on record for Downdetector.”

Read more at Ars Technica