'Break up Big Tech': What caused 15-hour AWS outage? Here is why US senator attacked tech giants later

US Senator Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday renewed calls to "break up" Big Tech—a collective term for tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others.

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This comes after a massive outage on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—Amazon's premier cloud computing platform used by nearly half the internet to power their apps/websites.

"If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big," she reasoned in a post on X.

The AWS outage, which lasted almost 15 hours, sent shockwaves across the world. The problem mainly took place between 11:49 PM PDT on Sunday (12:19 PM IST on Monday) to 2:24 AM PDT on Monday (2:54 PM IST on Monday), and was finally solved at 3:01 PM PDT on Monday (3:31 AM IST on Tuesday).

It cut off access to not just popular apps and websites like Canva, PUBG, and Snapchat, but also some government, media, and banking platforms, such as Halifax Bank (UK), HMRC (UK), Paypal-operated Venmo (US), and The New York Times (US).

The world's biggest cloud service provider has since said on its status page that the problem first arose at one of its main data centres in Virginia—one of its biggest and oldest data centres—after a technical update of DynamoDB's API.

DynamoDB is a vital cloud database service that stores important data for many online platforms, including user information. An API is simply a set of protocols that help connect various applications.

The problem began when an error in the update affected the Domain Name System (DNS)—the internet's address book system that helps platforms find the correct server addresses.

Things went downhill from there.

Due to the DNS issue, platforms could not find the server address for DynamoDB's API, and were unable to connect. This led to DynamoDB's outage, bringing down many AWS services with it.

More than a hundred platforms in the US were affected as a result, which was reflected in their overseas apps/websites as well.