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Doug Jacobson, University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University

Why cloud service outages ripple across the internet – and the economy

A cloud outage in 2024 disrupted air travel around the world. AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

When most people think about the internet, they likely picture websites and apps. What they rarely see are the invisible services that make those experiences possible: systems that translate names into numbers, verify who you are, deliver messages and block malicious traffic.

For example, DNS, the Domain Name System, has quietly become a single point of failure. DNS is the internet’s phone book. When it fails, large parts of the internet effectively disappear, even if servers are still running.

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