To put it politely, Amazon metaphorically shit the bed today. You see, Amazon Web Services/AWS provides a lot of servers/web power for multiple web services, including Alexa, Ring, Reddit, Snapchat, Wordle, and even more. At almost 3 AM Eastern time, some unclear operational issue caused a ton of services to stop working/crash violently. Hospitals, banks, airplane flights, and other important services were affected. Everything is--as of now--finally back online, but this cost hundreds of billions of dollars in terms of financial impact.
What happened today goes to show a couple of things:
1. We are always one tech hiccup away from society as we know it possibly crashing/erupting into mayhem.
2. For this reason, it is important to keep our tech infrastructure updated and backed up with multiple alternatives in case something goes wrong and we need a second-string or even third-string option, so to speak.
If a cluster of servers goes down, an internet cloud malfunctions, or anything else bad happens, and it causes important services to stop working, that is alarming. It isn't just Venmo being on the fritz; literal things that are important for folks staying alive were not working. If AWS or any other web service doesn't have a plan B, C, and even D, we should be worried. When some malfunctions cause this much of a problem, I get scared, considering what could happen if someone with malicious intent went after these kinds of services. I'd call what happened today a wake-up call, but if this much is at stake, then nobody should've been hitting the metaphorical snooze button in the first place!
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