A cloud outage in 2024 disrupted air travel around the world.

(AMES, IOWA) 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.

Originally published on theconversation.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.

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