Angry US Senator says ‘break up Big Tech’ after Amazon Web Services outage hit major platforms

US Senator Elizabeth Warren has renewed her call to break up Big Tech – a term collectively used for the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and others – after a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) that disrupted access to several major online platforms and government websites.

The AWS outage which lasted for nearly 15 hours affected multiple services that rely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

Users across the US and UK reported problems accessing apps and websites including Disney+ from Walt Disney Co., the McDonald’s app, Reddit, Robinhood, Ring, and Snapchat.Following reports of the disruption, Warren quoted a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) highlighting the incident and naming affected companies. She captioned the post, “If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period. It’s time to break up Big Tech.”Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., provides cloud computing and hosting services to thousands of businesses and public institutions around the world. Outages at AWS can cause widespread disruptions because of its extensive role in supporting internet infrastructure.Warren’s remarks have reignited discussions in Washington over the risks of overreliance on a few large tech companies to power essential online systems.

The senator, who has been a long-time critic of large technology firms, has repeatedly called for stronger antitrust measures to reduce the dominance of major players such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta.As of this morning, Amazon said most services had been restored.

What caused Amazon Web Services outage

In its status page, Amazon said that the outage was caused by DNS resolution failure affecting DynamoDB.“We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.

Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1,” the company said. The issue has now been resolved. Giving a summary of the incident, Amazon writes:“Between 11:49 PM PDT on October 19 and 2:24 AM PDT on October 20, we experienced increased error rates and latencies for AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Additionally, services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM and DynamoDB Global Tables also experienced issues during this time.

At 12:26 AM on October 20, we identified the trigger of the event as DNS resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints.

After resolving the DynamoDB DNS issue at 2:24 AM, services began recovering but we had a subsequent impairment in the internal subsystem of EC2 that is responsible for launching EC2 instances due to its dependency on DynamoDB. As we continued to work through EC2 instance launch impairments, Network Load Balancer health checks also became impaired, resulting in network connectivity issues in multiple services such as Lambda, DynamoDB, and CloudWatch. We recovered the Network Load Balancer health checks at 9:38 AM. As part of the recovery effort, we temporarily throttled some operations such as EC2 instance launches, processing of SQS queues via Lambda Event Source Mappings, and asynchronous Lambda invocations. Over time we reduced throttling of operations and worked in parallel to resolve network connectivity issues until the services fully recovered. By 3:01 PM, all AWS services returned to normal operations. Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours. We will share a detailed AWS post-event summary.”