It was the internetocalyse – popular sites like Trello, Quora, Gizmodo, and countless others went down last night. The culprit? Amazon Web Services. Amazon has become the market leader in providing cloud services, and currently has over 30% of marketshare. This dominance also means that when something goes wrong with Amazon, it causes ripple effects across the internet.
As Amazon engineers struggled to bring up millions of affected sites, the memes started flowing in thick and fast.
https://twitter.com/suhaibmalik/status/836686235787735040
https://twitter.com/prtikku/status/836692934175166464
https://twitter.com/ellisonleao/status/836681058582134784
There was some snark reserved for cloud services in general.
https://twitter.com/hunegnaw/status/836662039502327809
https://twitter.com/SpartanWire/status/836661949966483457
People were unhappy with Amazon’s official reporting of the outage – and tried to find creative ways around it.
https://twitter.com/Schmidt_RB/status/836641520321179648
And it being 2017, an internet outage meant that a lot more than websites went down – an Internet of Things means that when the internet goes down, the things go down with it.
https://twitter.com/Hamster_Brian/status/836666914344611841
With most of the internet being inaccessible, it meant that develops had a legitimate excuse to slack off from work.
AWS outages are like Snow Days for web developers.
— Kyle Fox (@kylefox) February 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/adamzdanielle/status/836648353081540608
AWS S3 is down (!!), should we expect a baby boom in 9 months?
— dalmoz (@dalmoz_) February 28, 2017
And other than big sites, the outage impacted lots of ordinary people too – and it came with a heavy dose of irony. An Amazon presenter, while presenting about the AWS, realized that the service has was talking about was down while he was on stage.
https://twitter.com/ian_surewould/status/836645989972918272
People were glad that there were some services that weren’t affected…
https://twitter.com/blessingthinker/status/836673792298594304
…but horrifed that some others were. The outage was so pervasive that it even took down www.Isitdownrightnow.com – the default site for people to check if a site is up or not.
https://twitter.com/bcbwilla/status/836669511231127552
https://twitter.com/subnetwork/status/836657108103872512