What is DNS? A computer engineer explains this foundational piece of the web – and why it’s the internet’s Achilles’ heel

By: Doug Jacobson, Iowa State University, The Conversation

Outlets: The Conversation

Published: October 31, 2025

Words: 933

Last Updated: 3 weeks, 4 days ago

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By Doug Jacobson, Iowa State University

When millions of people suddenly couldn’t load familiar websites and apps during the Amazon Web Services, or AWS, outage on Oct. 20, 2025, the affected servers weren’t actually down. The problem was more fundamental – their names couldn’t be found.

The culprit was DNS, the Domain Name System, which is the internet’s phone book. Every device on the internet has a numerical IP address, but people use …

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