What is DNS and how is the internet system linked to the AWS outage

Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud-services provider, suffered a widespread disruption on Monday morning that degraded services for several companies, including AI firm Perplexity, Paypal’s Venmo, as well as Coinbase and Robinhood financial platforms.

“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,” the company said.

According to the AWS Health Dashboard, “The issue appears to be related to the DNS resolution of the Dynamo DB API endpoint in US-East-1. Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and Dynamo DB Global Tables may also be experiencing issues.”

What is DNS?

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the phonebook of the Internet. Humans access information online through domain names, like nytimes.com or espn.com.

Web browsers interact through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources.

Each device connected to the Internet has a unique IP address which other machines use to find the device.

DNS servers eliminate the need for humans to memorize IP addresses such as 192.168.1.1 (in IPv4), or more complex newer alphanumeric IP addresses such as 2400:cb00:2048:1::c629:d7a2 (in IPv6).

What is the process of DNS resolution?

The process of DNS resolution involves converting a hostname (such as www.example.com) into a computer-friendly IP address (such as 192.168.1.1).

An IP address is given to each device on the Internet, and that address is necessary to find the appropriate Internet device – like a street address is used to find a particular home.

When a user wants to load a webpage, a translation must occur between what a user types into their web browser (example.com) and the machine-friendly address necessary to locate the example.com webpage.