When the Cloud Crashes: The AWS Outage, Internet Fragility, and Why It Matters More Than You Think
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Bogdan Mihalca
6 months ago
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3 min read
Why the AWS Outage Hit Harder Than a Coffee Shortage
Ever wake up, check your messages, and wonder why half your apps are on vacation? That was me, scrolling Twitter and Reddit when bam:, MyfitnessPal, Jira, Snap… all down. The culprit? Another AWS DNS outage, this time in the legendary US-EAST-1 zone. If you think this whole “Amazon broke the Internet” thing is rare, let me break it to you: we’re one bad config away from digital chaos more often than feels comfortable.
Single Point of Failure: Didn’t We Learn This in School?
The story is classic: AWS, powering everything from fun games to my mom's Alexa, takes a hit. Suddenly, major services vaporize. Headlines like “Amazon outage breaks much of the internet” and “Major AWS outage took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and more” were everywhere. But this isn’t just about your evening plans going sideways or your morning playlist refusing to play. It’s about how tied up we are in a tiny handful of tech giants, all betting on the same horses for infrastructure.
DNS: The Achilles’ Heel Nobody Wants to Talk About
DNS is like the address book of the internet. Screw it up, and nobody finds anyone. AWS’s outage started with internal EC2 networking, but DNS issues made the collateral damage global. I’m still surprised, the same basic flaw has rattled the web for decades, but most teams (and, frankly, many devs) still treat DNS like some “set and forget” thing. Until it bites.
A Little Redundancy Goes a Long Way
I’m obsessed with keeping things online, probably because I have this horror of my personal projects crashing on demo day. Here’s the honest truth: Most setups put all their eggs in the AWS basket. Multi-region? Maybe. Multi-cloud (GCP, Azure mixed in)? Rare. Backup DNS? Even rarer. There’s no magical fix, but here are some lessons I’ve batched up over the years:
