AWS has published its summary of the Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region which made the headlines on 20 October 2025:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cev1en9077ro "...why did it make the internet fall apart"

Perhaps the most surprising part of the reporting is how much noise was made about it, at least in the UK, sometimes equating to impending hyped doom reports of the "death of the net predicted" and mixing into a it a good measure of "it's always a DNS problem...". I'll spare you the links to the articles, just search for them on a search engine.

What's more interesting is the actual AWS summary which they have published:
https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/

Having been around for long enough to have seen the 'net grow over the years, the first thing that struck me is the complexity of these cloud networks that now form most of the Internet. No longer is this just a simple server -> client scenario with a handful of routers and TCP/IP. The way by which the Heart of today's world works, aka the "back end" to all of our Apps and Web sites is way more complicated than I ever imagined.

Yes, one of my companies is an AWS customer so I wasn't a total novice into the AWS instances, NLB, EC2 and Route 53. But the process by which this all works (supposedly like clockwork and sometimes not) surpassed my imagination.

And this is where I discovered the "seamless scale" whereas you can keep track of the whole ecosystem of virtual machine instances and load balancers using a constantly updated dynamic DNS. I frankly do not know how to give it a name, but the times of manually inputting listings into a file at /var/named/data/example.hosts  is long gone!

So here's my question: is the DNS fit for purpose for the use AWS is making of it?

I wonder whether we could ask if anyone on the SSAC could explain this to us in a few minutes during the ALAC meeting with the SSAC on Sunday?

Kindest regards,

Olivier