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.

In 2017, an Amazon engineer typed one command wrong.

The goal: remove a small set of S3 storage servers for debugging. The command targeted a URL path. But the path was wrong -- it matched a much larger set of servers than intended.

Within minutes, half the internet went down. Slack, Trello, Quora, Business Insider, IFTTT, the SEC's EDGAR system -- all dead. For 4 hours. Because one URL path was too broad.

The typo: one wrong address. The cost: $150 million in losses across the internet.