Amazon Web Services Went Down Last Night, And Programmers Everywhere Lost Their Minds

OfficeChai Team

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.

There was some snark reserved for cloud services in general.

People were unhappy with Amazon’s official reporting of the outage – and tried to find creative ways around it.

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.

With most of the internet being inaccessible, it meant that develops had a legitimate excuse to slack off from work.

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.

People were glad that there were some services that weren’t affected…

…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.