"Everything is in "the cloud" now, except the cloud is a real place, and it's in Northern Virginia. Rows and rows of servers stacked in Amazon-owned warehouses across Ashburn, Haymarket, McNair, Manassas, and Sterling make up a chunk of the infrastructure for the modern internet-equipment as crucial as railway tracks and the electric grid. When a technical issue disrupted operations at those facilities yesterday, it was enough to temporarily crash the internet for users around the world."
"The incident marked at least the third time in the past five years that Amazon Web Services' Northern Virginia facilities contributed to a widespread internet outage. This time, more than 1,000 sites and services were affected, according to Downdetector, costing companies an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars. Venmo users were locked out of their payments, and international banks experienced major blips in their service. People struggled to book urgent doctor appointments and couldn't access their Medicare benefits."
A technical failure at Amazon Web Services facilities in Northern Virginia briefly disrupted internet access for users worldwide. More than 1,000 sites and services experienced outages, affecting payments, banking, health scheduling, and widely used apps like Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram, and Hulu. The region houses dense stacks of servers in Amazon-owned warehouses that serve as critical physical infrastructure for the internet. The outage represented at least the third significant regional AWS-related disruption in five years and underscored the economic and social consequences of concentrated cloud dependency and the physical fragility of digital services.
Read at The Atlantic
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