What is a URL / endpoint — CCA-F Exam Prep

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REAL STORY An Amazon engineer at a terminal, one command visible on screen. A map of the internet with red nodes going dark one by one -- Slack, Trello, Quora, IFTTT, Business Insider. A typo highlighted in yellow in the command. February 28, 2017.

An Amazon engineer at a terminal, one command visible on screen. A map of the internet with red nodes going dark one by one -- Slack, Trello, Quora, IFTTT, Business Insider. A typo highlighted in yellow in the command. February 28, 2017.

In 2017, an Amazon engineer typed one command wrong. Half the internet went dark.

The goal was simple: remove a small set of S3 storage servers for debugging. The command targeted a URL path. But the path was too broad -- it matched far more servers than intended.

Within minutes, Slack went down. Then Trello. Then Quora, Business Insider, IFTTT, the SEC's EDGAR filing system. All dead. For 4 hours. Because one address was wrong.