AWS breach leaves millions in the dark, suggesting need for better API monitoring

Millions of users of popular apps, such as Facebook, Ring, Alexa, Disney+, and more, were left scratching their heads and wondering when they would be back online due to a widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Tuesday.

The outbreaks centered on a number of core AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region, including increased API failure rates with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and Amazon Connect, which handles contact center calls.

We are seeing impact on several AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 region. This issue also affects some of our monitoring and incident response tools, delaying our ability to provide updates. Affected services include: EC2, Connect, DynamoDB, Glue, Athena, Timestream and Chime and other AWS services in US-EAST-1. The root cause of this problem is a weakening of several network devices in the US-EAST-1 region. We are pursuing multiple mitigation avenues in parallel, and have seen some signs of improvement, but we do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time. Root logins for consoles in all AWS regions are affected by this issue, but customers can log in to consoles other than US-EAST-1 by using an IAM role for authentication.

— AWS Service Health Dashboard

Although the outage originated in the eastern United States, the trickle-down effect produced increased error messages across nearly the entire country, affecting everything from payment apps, airline reservation systems, car rental agencies and video streaming services. The power outage even brought many of the huge online retailer’s distribution centers to a standstill as engineers tried to fix the problem as quickly as possible.

Of particular interest is the effect on APIs, which connect the technological ecosystems of many organizations. APIs allow businesses to monetize data, establish profitable partnerships, and open new doors that encourage innovation and growth. APIs also play an important role in website uptime. The more APIs you use, the more likely you will encounter downtime that can affect your app’s performance. While no one expects 100% uptime, five nines or 99.999% uptime is the gold standard for system availability.

As the number of APIs connecting to various platforms grows every day, it is important to ensure that inevitable API downtime does not degrade the user experience, and with that comes the need for improved API monitoring.

APIs power your business, and knowing when they break is key to mitigating issues and getting as much information as possible to diagnose underlying issues before they impact your customer base. An advanced, multi-step API monitoring plan lets you build, test, and check your APIs for performance, functionality, and uptime. The key to keeping your APIs up and running 24/7 is an enhanced monitoring solution that offers:

• Multi-level monitoring – test APIs from top to bottom by making multiple HTTP requests and retrieving data from each request to perform second-step tasks.
• Performance Monitoring – check the performance of each request, set maximum response time claims and spot trends in your performance dashboards.
• Verifying API functionality – test redirects, authentication, perform CRUD or other API interaction, and monitor for result codes and check if your API returns expected content.
• Monitoring your APIs from hundreds of global checkpoints – seek Simultaneous monitoring to test from several locations at the same time.
• Get instant notifications – know the moment your API is in trouble with alerts and escalations from Uptrends.

Outages of the kind involving AWS and other cloud computing platforms are often complex and can have major consequences for individuals, companies and governments downstream. They can take significant resources to recover from, especially financially.

API monitoring provides the kind of benefits that allow organizations to stay ahead of the kinds of disruptions witnessed recently, reduce downtime, and is especially important for those engaged in e-commerce. Ask us about API monitoring and more monitoring solutions Uptrends can offer your business.