The Cause and Effects of the AWS Outage

Officially, Amazon has stated that the issue was caused by a “latent defect” in its DynamoDB Domain Name System. This caused connection issues throughout AWS, which caused the crash. A domain name system, often abbreviated as DNS, allows IP addresses to be connected with domain names so they can be found by users/applications/services. A good metaphor is trying to remember the phone numbers of all of your contacts without the address book on your phone. Unofficially, Amazon has been laying off large numbers of AWS engineers, in favor of AI tools, as cost-cutting measures. It would also appear that this decision was extremely premature.

Case Medical, despite being a user of AWS, was minimally impacted by the outage. Case Medical takes a hybrid approach to networking and is not solely reliant on AWS. We utilize local file servers that back-up to AWS and applications on AWS that can fail to local servers. Other applications on AWS are designed to fail over to other AWS regions so they were not impacted by the outage. Being ISO 27001 certified, redundancy is a chief concern and all systems are designed to be as redundant as possible. A hybridized approach also helps lessen the high operating costs AWS is famously associated with.

We always talk about how CaseTrak360 runs on AWS and doesn’t use local servers. Indeed, it is one of our few applications that runs only on AWS. However, it is designed to fail over to different regions if one goes down. When US-East-1 was heavily affected by the AWS outage, CaseTrak360 failed over to US-East-2, and then again to US-West-2. Throughout the outage, CaseTrak360’s services were never impacted, and users could still access and use the system as if nothing had happened. It is CaseTrak360’s high level of security and redundancy that make it such a great software choice for healthcare settings, where delays/outages can put patients and staff at risk.

Want to learn more about Case Medical’s robust and secure IT infrastructure? Or how CaseTrak360 can make a positive impact on your facility? Reach out to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to learn more.

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Kindest Regards,

Marcia Frieze and the Case Medical team