You probably noticed that the Internet was full of blocked services on Monday due to a major Amazon Web Services outage. Government websites in the UK were down, airline booking sites were down, online shopping was down and my son could not do his math practice! He didn’t find that a tragedy. But this has become a familiar tale of late. Why? Amazon says the problem came from inside the house: an internal subsystem that monitors its network load balancers failed, which in turn caused widespread DNS errors and database disruptions in its U.S.-East-1 region. The company later said the issue had been “fully mitigated.” The bigger story is our growing dependence on these few private companies to keep everything running — from public infrastructure to teenagers’ homework. It is an uncomfortable reality to face, isn’t it? The post The Internet’s Single Point of Failure appeared first on Redacted.