Almost like the internet shouldn’t be put in such big hubs, one might say it shouldn’t be so centralised but should still connect to each other, in some sort of a federation, perhaps?
Look at all of us, wildly ahead of the curve!! We are the future!
But for real, the intense concentration of information into what’s ultimately little tiny fail points can’t ever end well. We’ve gotten a few of these wakeup calls now. In my country a few years ago, one of the main cellular networks suddenly went down, and it dragged down all of our payment systems as an added bonus, plus 911 coverage and all sorts of other failures. That afternoon you couldn’t get money depending on who your bank was, you almost certainly couldn’t make a payment anywhere, couldn’t call for help, etc. It ultimately only lasted a few hours, but it put the politicians in a frenzy. Of course nothing really concrete has been done about it either.
A lot of countries are promoting cash again. If the infrastructure can have problems like that all by itself imagine what it would be like if there was a coordinated and deliberate strike on the server centers, towers and satellites and I’m not just talking about hackers. Bombers will fuck your shit up permanently.
I’m even starting to feel like a crotchety old man by wondering if I should be purchasing some physical precious metals.
Everyone says this every time us-east-1 goes down, in 3 months it’ll be forgotten.
And in 2 years, it will be back in the headlines! Because us-east-1 always goes down, and AWS and its customers are destined to repeat the same mistakes, and reporters will rinse & repeat.
Honestly - the worst part was that the AWS web console was affected. Even companies & teams that have multi-region failover and DR plans struggle when they can’t use the console.
AWS seems to have a helluva lot of failure points too. I’m not an IT expert, but I’m pretty sure this is far from the first time this has happened, correct?
They had a big us-east-1 S3 outage back in ~2018 (docker hub went down then too), and another us-east-1 DynamoDB outage ~3 years ago…
On the whole, they do an amazing job. But when they have a big issue, it will be something tricky and painful … they tackled the low hanging fruit years ago.
