oh sure, when they fuck up DNS it’s a “race condition”.
when I fuck up DNS it’s a “fireable offense”.
It was the best race anyone has ever seen 🫲🍊🫱
Let’s be honest, not all races are equal<br> 🫲🍊🫱
It’s not DNS
There’s no way it’s DNS
It was DNS
That and BGP
If I had a nickel for every time clearing the ARP tables fixed a problem, I’d have a shitload of nickels.
If clearing the ARP tables fixes the issue you have bigger problems
These things happen when a skinflint company contracts out network setup for a decade, gets acquired by another skinflint company who axes the contractors and doesn’t hire on-site network personnel, gradually builds out infra on top of the unsupported foundation, and then hires c suite buddies who want to bring in their own people to further muddy the waters.
So it is always DNS
can confirm, its always DNS. Even when it looks like a network issue, its DNS
Spotted the Network guy
Oh man. One of my old companies, the Devs would always blame the network. Even after we spent a year upgrading and removing all SPOFs. They’d blame the network……
“Your application is somehow producing 2 billion packets per second and your SQL queries are returning 5GB of data”…. “See! The network is too slow and it has problems”
I always view the source of websites like this and this is one of the worst I’ve seen. 217 lines of code (including inline Javascript?!) and a Google tag for some reason, all to put the word YES in green on black.
this made me mad so i made a single, ultra minimal html page in 5 minutes that you can just paste in your url box
data:text/html;base64,PCFkb2N0eXBlaHRtbD48Ym9keSBzdHlsZT10ZXh0LWFsaWduOmNlbnRlcjtmb250LWZhbWlseTpzYW5zLXNlcmlmO2JhY2tncm91bmQ6IzAwMDtjb2xvcjojMmYyPjxoMT5JcyBpdCBETlM/PC9oMT48cCBzdHlsZT1mb250LXNpemU6MTJyZW0+WWVzsource code:
<!doctypehtml><body style=text-align:center;font-family:sans-serif;background:#000;color:#2f2><h1>Is it DNS?</h1><p style=font-size:12rem>YesAgreed, could be static HTML and a GIF.
Thanks, I won’t click that link.
Did not think of doing that.
I guess i never expected anyone to have a fcking JavaScript on a simple page as that
deleted by creator
It’s always DNS
That’s what you get when you let go hundreds of employees from your cloud computing unit in favour of AI.
I hope they end up having to compensate all the billions of losses they caused to all the businesses and people.
Oops! All slop!
Consequences? For Amazon?
lol… lmao even
They do have contracts and are obligated to provide a certain “up time”, which is usually 99% or so. If they fail to provide that, they are liable to compensate for the losses.
Or do you think that Amazon is above the law and no other company could sue them?
It all depends on what kind of contracts they have.
These contracts do not stipulate reimbursement for lost revenue. The “uptime guarantee” just gets you a partial discount or service refund for the impacted services.
It is on the customer to architect their environment for high availability (use multiple regions or even multiple hyperscalers, depending on the uptime need).
Source: I work at an enterprise that is bound by one of these agreements (although not with AWS).
SLA contracts can have a plethora of stipulations, including fines and damages for missing SLO. It really depends on how big and important the customer is. For example, you can imagine government contracts probably include hefty fines for causing downtime or data loss, although I am not involved with or familiar with public sector/ government contracts or their terms.
You can imagine that a customer that is big enough to contract a cloud provider to build new locations and install a bunch of new hardware just for them, would also be big enough to leverage contract terms that include fines and compensation for extended downtime or missing SLO.
I work at a data center for a major cloud provider, also not AWS
It’s not at all uncommon for fines to be built into an SLA
Much of this stuff is automatic - I’ve worked with such contracted services where uptime is guaranteed. The contracts dictate the terms and conditions for refunds, we see them on a monthly basis when uptime is missed and it’s not done by a person.
I imagine many companies have already seen refunds for outage time, and Amazon scrambled to stop the automation around this.
They’ll have little to stand on in court for something this visible and extensive, and could easily lose their shirt with fines and penalties when a big company sues over breech when they choose to not renew.
Just cause they’re big doesn’t mean all their clients are small or don’t have legal teams of their own.
99% uptime in a year gives you 3.65 days of downtime, which I think would still be within SLA (assuming nothing else happened this year). Though, once you get to 1 9 reliability (99.9%), you’ve got a shift and change you can be down before you breach SLA.
If their reliability metrics are monthly, 99% gets you less than a shift of down time, so they’d be out of SLA and could probably yell to get money back.
I worked at a datacenter that sold clients 99.99% uptime.
Fun times with a maximum of about one hour of downtime per year for hundreds of servers
Most services have a clause that they are not liable for unforseen issues… Depends how good the lawyers were when formalizing the contracts.
Good luck arguing that a missed config counts as an ‘unforeseen issue’. If they go that route, people will be all over them for not being SOC compliant wrt change control.
They can try to argue that latency issue and the stale state were an unknown / unanticipated problem. Like when half of Canadas Rogers network went down affecting most debit payment systems. Testing of routing showed it OK, realworld flip went haywire.
Amazon has more money than most countries. They can outlast any company in court, or just ban you from their services in the future.
Depends on who we’re talking about. Companies like finance orgs are all about legal contracts and would be able to hold their feet to the fire.
You don’t want to go to court against a finance company or any very large org where contract law is their bread and butter (basically any large/multinational corp).
Amazon’s not hosting just small operations.
They have ORANGE ass makeup on their lips. How did THAT get there???
Mistakes happen with or without AI
The problem is that the current internet is structured in a way that creates high risk systems that can cause a massive outage. We went from having thousands of independent companies to a handful of massive ones. A mistake by a single company shouldn’t be able to black out half the internet.
Was it proven that AI wa the cause?
In not saying it wasn’t, just that if it really was, I’d like a source for that claim
No, but it clearly wasn’t the solution. They likely could have used some of those people they fired for that.
There was an article in my lemmy all feed yesterday claiming so. But it was a super questionable shady site, which people were calling out.
Silly peon rich people don’t suffer consequences.
That’s what you get when you let go hundreds of employees
OK but then… what happens when their boss jerk fires hundreds of thousands?
This is purely anecdotal, but I have been running into a lot of DNS issues over the past couple months where I work. 3 of the computers and even one of the laptops for remote work were having DNS issues that needed to be fixed. One even needed Windows reinstalled after fixing the DNS issue (Which was probably unrelated, but worth mentioning)
I’m honestly starting to think that the internet in general might be imploding. Not sure why, but replacing so many developers and programmers with AI might be responsible. Who knows, but it’s definitely very strange.
A huge problem are developers who lack a fundamental understanding of how the internet even works. I’ve had to explain how short, unqualified names resolve vs how fqdns resolve. Or why even you may not be able to reach another node in your proverbial cluster, because they are on different subnets. Or, why using GUIDs as hostnames is a generally bad idea, and will cause things to fail in unpredictable ways, especially with deeply nested subdomains.
GUIDs?
Could you expand on that topic? :)guids like these: https://guidgenerator.com/
Why the fuck would anyone use a guid as a hostname?
My favorite I’ve seen in the category was when they had hostnames that were basically the IP address decorated with some bullshit. Like yeeeeeeeeah, that totally makes fucking sense. 😆
I have worked with too many devs that didn’t even know what the 7 layers/OSI are or why they exist.
they didn’t know what a network port was used for and why it’s important to not expose 3306 to the internet.
they couldn’t understand that fragmentation of a message bus occurs when you don’t dedupe the contents.
you know, morons.
Ah, the common clay of the new Web
The biggest issue is how centralized the internet has become. It went from a bunch of local servers to a handful of cloud providers.
We need to spread things out again
That’s not how capitalism works though
Luckily, it’s not the entire Internet, just the unfun part.
Signal is definitely part of the fun internet, they just decided to rely on AWS due to techbro culture I assume?
They rely on AWS due to favourable contract in hosting it, and also proving the proof of concept that they can be hosted securely on a hostile provider, without the provider having any clues at all in what data is being sent between the parties.
sure, proving to the audience that you can kick yourself in the nuts over and over while maintaining the privacy of your testicle’s innards is impressive from a biological standpoint but it still looks stupid to a normal person. I don’t hate signal, I will continue using it but this and their crypto scam makes me doubt some of their choices and how they’ll operate in the future
Huh? What crypto scam?
Moxie works for MobileCoin and implemented a crypto wallet for it inside of Signal which could be an attempt to sneakily monetize the Signal userbase
after looking further into it, he might’ve also been involved in the MobileCoin pump and dump
I DNS see that coming.
Ironically, my pihole is blocking that link. So here’s a clean one: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/23/amazon_outage_postmortem/
Racist DNS!
I’m glad these things happen… it keeps everyone aware that cloud is fragile and Plan B should be considered for mission critical tasks.
I’m also hoping that it will improve cloud resiliency because a complete / partial restart of cloud systems needs a whole different approach than maintaining a running system.
Many different companies abruptly realized they need a DR plan for cloud outages
They should check out YUNOhost.
Makes sense. DNS is quite a single point of failure
It is designed to not to be. The RFC literally warns against single points of failure
Its true.
It comes up at work, it comes up in discussions on Linux podcasts I listen to, it comes up here…
We have a big, dangerous impending problem in DNS.
The issue here isn’t DNS. The issue here is a large portion of the internet relying on a single data centre on the US East coast. Ideally, a lot of competing hosting companies would exist so if one goes down, it’s just one service and very few people notice.
So much this.
Why is Signal hosted in one location on AWS, for example? That’s the sort of thing that should be in multiple places around the world with automatic fail over.
I hope they work towards mitigating this risk from now on.
I prefer end to end encrypted xmpp
I prefer face to face communication, speaking in code and whispering in eachother’s ears so nobody else can hear.
Yes, that’s true, I guess it’s a separate issue. But the way DNS currently runs is a problem waiting to happen.
So, in the end they turned off the thing that caused this whole mess and everything is still working.
What’s the point of having it, then?
They got off sync.
