As a fifty year IT veteran I actually understand the underpinnings of this shit. It’s a bit freaky. Those who understand on here will know what I mean. It was funny that last week I wrote on here that banks using cloud services was problem, then the next day AWS went down impacting the banks stupid enough to use shared infrastructure. I also wrote that the regulator allowing such outsourcing was irresponsible. By Jesus it was, but whose head will roll?
As a Lloyds account holder I find it concerning that a fault in a data center in Virginia should cause the Lloyds system to crash. I would have thought that Lloyds make enough money to have their own separate system, and indeed that the duty of care they have towards the security of their account holders money and personal details would require them to have their own system.
To a point. The fault last week was effectively in the internet’s telephone directory and a line needs to be drawn somewhere on what services are delivered by the bank itself.
I’d hope that the services that actually manage the money and so on are kept in-house.
Not quite. It was a software issue at AWS that involved a local cached DNS directory rather than any of the root DNS servers that service most of the internet. A classic race condition in the software triggered by a specific set of circumstances. It was a right f*** up.
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I was keeping it simple.
I know 
, but I thought I should clarify why it was only AWS customers that were affected.
Although true, DNS has long been recognised as a critical but fragile part of the network infrastructure.
As is so often the case there is an appropriate XKCD for this
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Vodafone had a similar DNS outage a couple of weeks ago - I had no broadband or mobile phone service for several hours.
I wonder if that was AWS doing a trial run. 
Very true. The stupid thing in this case though is that it didn’t really have anything to do with DNS, but badly written software that tried to speed up DNS queries going badly wrong.
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Really hope they don’t tighten up ridiculously as fiddling with DNS directly seems to be a useful option some VPN!’s have.