Amazon Web Services outage trolled as rehearsal for the end of the internet | Latest Tech News
An hours-long crash of Amazon Web Services sparked a wave of tongue-in-cheek, apocalyptic memes Monday as social media customers coped with the disruption of major websites and apps around the world.
Posts on X, Reddit and more mocked the meltdown with viral photographs including Homer Simpson warning “The end is near,” the standard cartoon-dog meme once again declaring amid flames, “This is fine,” and clips asking, “What do we do now?”
While most providers have been back online within hours, the social-media response was relentless. Users joked that the collapse of their favourite apps was “the rehearsal for the end of the internet.”
Posts mocked the meltdown with viral photographs including Homer Simpson warning, “The end is near.” @marcuslayerx/X
Echoing the famend yellow-dog meme, one person posted an image of panicked workplace staff insisting, “I’m fine … everything is fine.”
Others posted clips of customers screaming into telephones or mock-photos of engineers surrounded by yellow warning tape in server rooms.
The online mockery adopted a disruption that started around 3 a.m. ET and rippled across banks, retailers and gaming platforms before Amazon engineers restored most systems shortly after 5:30 a.m., according to the company’s service-status web page.
Amazon said the incident stemmed from an “operational issue” affecting a number of providers “in the US-EAST-1 region,” with a large data hub in Northern Virginia linked to the crash.
One meme confirmed a map of outage reviews captioned “The Entire Internet — AWS US-EAST-1.” @ImNotTheWolf/X
In an update, the company reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services” and said engineers have been “actively working on both mitigating the issue and fully understanding the root cause.”
By early morning, Amazon said most web sites and apps relying on its cloud have been working usually again while employees continued “to work through a backlog of queued requests.”
Another meme depicts X as a protected haven while other platforms are burning. @cb_doge/X
The two-hour outage left hundreds of thousands of customers unable to log in to platforms including Roblox, Snapchat, Ring, Fortnite, Hulu, Venmo, Coinbase, WhatsApp, the Starbucks app and Microsoft 365.
The British authorities’s official web site and online tax portal also went darkish, as did McDonald’s ordering systems in some markets, according to reviews.
A girl with broad eyes and a shocked expression says, “I’M FINE…EVERYTHING IS FINE.” @OmnipotentCEO/X
Screenshots posted to X confirmed AWS’ help account replying to waves of complaints as hashtags like #AWSdown and #internetcrash trended worldwide.
For many, the disruption served as a reminder that a lot of the trendy web relies upon on a handful of cloud suppliers — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — whose outages can halt communication, commerce and leisure within seconds.
Harry Halpin, chief govt of NymVPN, told the New York Times that the drawback possible started with a technical glitch in one of Amazon’s main data facilities.
Social-media customers flooded X, Reddit and TikTok with memes Monday. @tomipoint/X
But, he added, the company’s systems are inherently opaque, making it not possible to know the trigger unless Amazon disclosed it, according to the Times.
“If your entire nation’s infrastructure relies on a few providers, all in the United States, and anything can go down at any moment, either for malicious reasons or just technical errors, that’s an exceedingly dangerous situation,” Halpin was quoted as saying.
Another meme depicted Amazon technicians as clueless while attempting to restore the glitch. @CamKapHD/X
Amazon has not indicated that the breakdown was triggered by a cyberattack. The company said engineers are reviewing logs to decide what triggered the failure.
A cartoon canine calmly sipping espresso in a burning room captioned “This is fine.” @marcuslayerx/X
Monday’s disruption echoed earlier incidents in which faults inside major cloud or security companies cascaded across the internet.
In July 2024, a defective update from cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike triggered a daylong global outage that grounded airways and disrupted hospitals and governments.
AWS, which provides internet hosting energy to hundreds of firms worldwide, generates roughly 20% of Amazon’s complete gross sales and about 60% of its working revenue, according to company filings.
Despite the chaos, Amazon shares have been little modified in early trading Monday as markets opened, signaling buyers noticed the glitch as short-term.
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