Amazon Web Services (AWS) has bolstered its domain name system (DNS) service in response to the recent outage, which affected its cloud services worldwide for millions of users.

Amazon Route 53 now includes a 60-minute recovery time objective (RTO) for service disruptions affecting the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region. The feature hinges on accelerated recovery for managing public DNS records, providing access during failover issues to key Route 53 API operations, including ChangeResourceRecordSets, GetChange, ListHostedZones, and ListResourceRecordSets.

“The feature maintains access to essential Route 53 API operations, ensuring that DNS management remains available when it’s needed most. Organizations can continue to make critical DNS changes, provision new infrastructure, and redirect traffic flows without waiting for full service restoration,” said Micah Walter, senior solutions architect, AWS.

Accelerated recovery for Amazon Route 53 public hosted zones is available through AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS Software Development Kit (AWS SDKs), or infrastructure as code (IaC) tools, including AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK).

AWS said users can continue using their existing Route 53 API endpoint without modifying applications or scripts, and will not be charged additional costs for using the service.

The service was positioned as a solution for highly-regulated businesses in banking, fintech, and software as a service (SaaS) needing to make DNS changes during outages.

No mention of the recent AWS outage was included in the announcement, which saw 16 million user outage reports from across more than 60 countries during its 15-hour downtime.

That outage revolved around AWS’ US East region, which saw its DynamoDB DNS management system produce an empty DNS record that subsequently broke traffic routing to dependent services.