What Caused A Third of the Internet to Go Down - DTNS 5128

Good news for data center power consumption and for Samsung’s chip-making.

Starring Tom Merritt and Robb Dunewood.

TOM: This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, October 20, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow up on the context of those stories and help each other understand.

ROBB: Today how Amazon once again took out a chunk of the internet.

I’m Tom Merritt,

I’m Robb Dunewood.

TOM: Let’s start with what you need to know with the big story.

[[BIG STORY]]
[[SOLO story of the day. Basic details, monitor commentary and sound when possible.]]

“Major AWS outage across US-East region sows chaos online • The Register”
“Amazon’s AWS outage has knocked services like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo and more offline”
“Major AWS outage took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and more | The Verge”
“Service health - Oct 20, 2025 | AWS Health Dashboard | Global”

TOM: We don’t cover internet outages unless they are unusually big or have a very interesting explanation. Well we definitely have the first one with the AWS outage that took out a chunk of the internet early Monday morning.

Early Monday morning at 3:11 AM Eastern time, Amazon Web Services reported increased error rates and latencies for multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region in Northern Virginia.

I suspected something because our Echo couldn’t respond to turn off a light.

By 5:01 AM Eastern Amazon identified the problem related to DNS resolution of the DynamDB API endpoint. To oversimplify, websites relying on AWS in many cases couldn’t get their domain names resolved. So if, say, Reddit, wanted to query some data, the location that needed the data, reddit.com/pagethatneedsdata.html, couldn’t be resolved. Basically the data was fine, you just couldn’t get to it.

While this was just in the US-EAST Regions enough relied on data stored there, that it affected hundreds of websites on multiple continents.

By 6:35 AM Eastern, AWS said it had mitigated the DNS issue but some AWS services, especially EC2 were now having knock-on issues. EC2 operates virtual machines for companies, which is why you might have seen intermittent issues even after that time.

By 8:48 AM Eastern, AWS recommended that clients avoid certain “availability Zones” basically particular data centers in the region. At 9:42 AM AWS started rate limiting new EC2 launches.

At 11:43 AM Amazon said it identified the problem starting in the EC2 internal network in an underlying “internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”

That could mean the system might have inaccurately marked nodes as healthy or unhealthy, causing delays. And since the load balancer’s routing depends on DNS updates, it might also have failed to propagate those routing changes.

At 12:13 PM it started talking about pulling back on the throttling soon indicating it seems to have mitigated the problem in the subsystem and could start putting everything back together.

And at 1:03 PM Amazon announced similar problems in its Lambda system. Which is why I couldn’t turn on my studio lights right before we started to record.

AWS powers a huge chunk of the internet, with around a 30% of cloud market share by some estimates. And its US-EAST-1 region is particularly crucial. Problems at that region caused big outages in 2020, 2021, and 2023.

[[DISCUSS]]

ROBB: DTNS is made possible by you the listener. Thanks to
Larry Bailey
Michelle Sirjue
Kirk Steffensen
New Patron: A Beck

[[BREAK]]
[[PAUSE]]

TOM: There’s more we need to know today, let’s get to the briefs.

[[BRIEFS]]
[[3-5 more solo reads with sound to complete the day in tech news. These are informational with minor commentary.]]

“Exynos 2600 Wipes The Floor Against The Competition; Samsung’s Internal Testing Shows 6x Higher AI Performance Than A19 Pro, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 & More”
“Report: all Galaxy S26 models will use the Exynos 2600, but not in all regions - GSMArena.com news”

ROBB: Samsung is beginning to test its Exynos 2600 chips, its first 2-nanometer Gate All Around (or G-A-A) SoC. Korea Economic Daily compiled reports on internal tests that showed the Exynos 2600 was faster than the A19 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 both on CPU and GPU. These are internal tests under ideal conditions, but they do bode well for the chip even when it meets real world conditions. This also makes it believable that all Galaxy S26 models, not just the base model, will use the Exynos 2600 chip. At least in some regions.

“Apple’s (APPL) iPhone 17 Is Selling 14% Better Than Predecessor in US and China - Bloomberg”
“iPhone Air, One Month Later: My Camera and Battery Fears Have Been Put to Rest - CNET”
“I took an iPhone Air on vacation to test its two biggest floors”

TOM: It’s been a month since the launch of the iPhone 17 and sales estimates are beginning to come in. Counterpoint estimates that the iPhone 17 sold 14% better in its first ten days than the iPhone 16 did in both the US and China. In addition to sales numbers, we’re also getting reviews based on a month of testing. CNET and Apple Insider are among the reviewers surprised to find that battery life and camera quality were both sufficient in iPhone Air. CNET notes durability wasn’t a problem either.

“X is testing a new way of opening links in posts to improve engagement”
“X to launch marketplace for buying inactive handles | TechCrunch”

ROBB: X is testing a new way of handling links that lets you open a link while still seeing the like, repost and other buttons. The idea is to boost engagement numbers. X is also launching a marketplace to let paying users get inactive user names for free or in some cases by paying a fee. Priority usernames like full names, multi-word phrases or alphanumeric combinations will be transferred for free. However, some rare handles could cost you from $2500 to a few million dollars. Rare handles are short, generic, or culturally significant names. If multiple people want to buy a handle, X will select who gets it based on their use of and engagement on the platform and intended use of the handle. Rare handles include usernames like @Pizza, @Tom, and @One.

“Rainbow laser chip could help stop AI from eating power”
“Rainbow-on-a-chip’ could help keep AI energy demands in check — and it was created by accident | Live Science”
“Alibaba Cloud says it cut Nvidia AI GPU use by 82% with new pooling system— up to 9x increase in output lets 213 GPUs perform like 1,192 | Tom’s Hardware”

TOM: A few noteworthy items about technology that could help make data centers more power efficient.

Alibaba says it has created a new pooling system that let 213 GPUs perform like 1,192, cutting its use of Nvidia chips by 82%. It tested its Aegaeon system for several months in its Model Studio and will present a peer-reviewed paper on the system at the 2025 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems (SOSP) in Seoul.

Scientists from Xscape Photonics publishing in the October 7th edition of the journal Nature Photonics, described how they have created a highly-efficient photonics chip.

The scientists were trying to improve the lasers in long-range Lidar, often used in autonomous vehicles. They found that by accident they had created a natural frequency comb. Usually a frequency comb needs bulky expensive lasers, to split light into multiple colors. Each color can transmit a separate data stream. The small frequency comb they created fits on a thumbnail-sized chip, meaning it could replace racks of individual lasers and fiber that can only send one single wavelength.

Xscape Photonics principal engineer and former Columbia Engineering researcher Andres Gil-Molina said “If you can make them powerful, efficient and small enough, you can put them almost anywhere.”

TOM: And finally, some quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news in the future.

“Oura is redesigning its app weeks after Ceramic Ring launch”

ROBB: Oura is redesigning its app including a new feature called Cumulative Stress, which combines data from sleep, heart stress, temperature and activity.

“Apple Now Faces App Store Challenges in China, Too - MacRumors”

TOM: An antitrust complaint has been filed in China on behalf of 55 iPhone and iPad users, accusing Apple of abusing its control over app store distribution and payments.

“Adobe might’ve just solved one of generative AI’s biggest legal risks | ZDNET”

ROBB: Adobe is offering something it calls an “AI Foundry” that uses its copyright-safe model to train on a company’s own intellectual property to create personalized tools.

“Windows 11’s October update causes a serious recovery mode glitch - but there’s a workaround | ZDNET”

TOM: A bug in the October patch Tuesday update for Windows 11 stops USB devices from working in Windows Recovery environment, causing people to search out non-USB options for mouse and keyboard.

“OpenAI confirms GPT-6 is not shipping in 2025”

ROBB: An OpenAI employee who goes by Roono on X denied a report on CNBC that GPT-6 will ship by the end of the year.

“(21) Eric Migicovsky on X: ‘Pebble is officially back on iOS and Android! ...’ / X”

TOM: Eric Migicovsky posted on X that the Pebble Core apps have been accepted on Google Play and Apple app stores, ahead of the revived Pebble watches shipping this year.

TOM: What do YOU want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them at www.reddit.com/r/DailyTechNewsShow/

[[BREAK]]
[[PAUSE]]

[[HELPING EACH OTHER UNDERSTAND]]
[[Short missives from people with experience. Could be written email or pre-recorded from the person.]]

ROBB: We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today Curtis reminds us of an old friend.

TOM:
Curtis wrote:
Ever since the shows started covering talking to Copilot on Windows it reminded me of way back when Windows 95 included Dragon Naturally Speaking and I was telling my computer to open and close Windows and apps.

Lo and behold Jenn mentioned the same app today and brought it all together.

Great show!
Curtis

[[DISCUSS]]

ROBB: What are you thinking about? Got some insight into a story? Share it with us feedback@dailytechnewsshow.com

TOM: Thanks to Curtis for contributing to today’s show. And thank YOU for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron, at Patreon.com/dtns