The Internet Threw a Tantrum — Blame Amazon
Another reminder that the cloud isn’t as solid as it sounds
My Substack went down late last night as I was putting the finishing touches on Monday’s article. It finally saved, but this morning it still hadn’t published. Turns out, it wasn’t just me — the internet was throwing a tantrum. Ketchup all over the walls.
Amazon Web Services — AWS — had a massive meltdown that took down thousands of websites and apps around the world. Substack was one of them. So were Snapchat, Signal, Roblox, and Duolingo. Even Amazon’s own retail site and Ring doorbell service went dark.
According to Downdetector, more than 2,000 companies were hit, with over 8 million outage reports logged worldwide — including nearly 2 million in the U.S. and about 1 million in the U.K. In Britain, banks like Lloyds, Halifax, and the Bank of Scotland were affected, along with government sites like HM Revenue and Customs. Wordle, Slack, Coinbase, PlayStation, and Peloton all went offline too.
Amazon said the trouble started in its U.S.-East-1 region — that’s Virginia — where a glitch in an internal monitoring system sent a chain reaction through AWS’s cloud servers. Experts say it wasn’t a hack or cyberattack, just a technical failure with big consequences.
By late morning, Amazon said it was “seeing significant signs of recovery,” but problems continued into the afternoon.
Cybersecurity experts and internet analysts are calling this another warning sign: the web is far too dependent on a few big players. A handful of companies — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — now run most of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure.
Dr. Corinne Cath-Speth of Article 19 put it bluntly: “The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”
When one of them sneezes, the whole internet catches a cold. That mist gets everywhere — all inside your own devices.
The irony is, these companies are supposed to make things more reliable — redundant systems, backups, fail-safes, the whole pitch. But the larger and more centralized the network, the bigger the blast radius when something goes wrong.
Scotty said it best in Star Trek: The Search for Spock: “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”
For the record, AWS is the biggest cloud provider in the world. And when it goes down, you feel it — even if all you were trying to do was hit “publish.”
As I write this, everything’s working now — somewhat. Another reminder of how fragile the “always on” world really is.