The world found out just how reliant the internet is on Amazon Web Services, and it’s honestly quite worrisome.
While you were in your second dream, the internet suddenly crashed after AWS (Amazon Web Services), a cloud service many companies use, went down early this morning.
According to Tom’s Guide, the AWS outage began around 12:11am PDT (3:11am ET, 8:11am BST), and it showed immediately how much of a bad idea it is for one company to be the “backbone” of the internet, as hundreds of websites suddenly went down.
Popular apps like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, and Amazon, as well as services like Alexa, reported outages. Even the gaming world was affected by Fortnite, and Pokémon GO also saw massive outages.
Apple, which is also a prominent user of AWS, and according to AppleInsider, spends a whopping $30 million a month, saw all of its services, like Apple Pay, Apple Music, and AppleTV+, also suffer outages.
Tom’s Guide reports that despite AWS rolling out fixes, it has to play “whack-a-mole” as more websites continue to suffer outages as Amazon struggles to resolve the issue.
Social media began sounding off on just how problematic having AWS run everything is.
“The AWS outage should be evidence that running half the internet on a single company’s servers is a terrible idea but i fear nothing will change,” one person wrote on Bluesky.
Another Bluesky user wrote, “The AWS outage today is a good reminder that there is no “cloud”, there’s just somebody else’s computer.”
No lies detected here.
You can see more reactions below.
