The One That Connects All

This past Monday, I rolled out of bed and turned on my computer to notice that I couldn't get into my university's learning management system. Baffled, I texted my sibling, who uses it at another institution. But it was only after I read my morning news (I couldn't tell you which one because I read too many) that I realized that something much worse was going on.

Amazon Web Services, more specifically was down.

But other than my school systems, which wasn't so much a problem by the school and more the vendors, I wasn't actually that impacted.

Sure, I couldn't view/submit my assignments or grades or other edu-related tasks, but my technical stack for personal/professional cases were running alright. But this wasn’t just a me issue.

This was basically everyone.

For those who may not be aware, Amazon Web Services is, in a nutshell, the backbone of the Internet. Hundreds of services help power hundreds of thousands, if not millions of businesses. It is favored by customers due easy scaling processes and being one of the most documented. However, this has led to the company being the largest cloud provider in the world; and it seems that much of what powers the world today is hosted on this one company.

So, when something like a DNS error comes in and knocks out the us-east-01 region of the company, it leads to massive global outages from schools to restuarants to governments to airlines.

Every industry was affected by this, whether you knew it or not.

By the time everything was back up 15-18 hours later, the damage was done, and billions of dollars were lost.

Now that we learned that little trivial piece of history, it may be surprising to know that many of the software/services that I use personally weren't impacted.

Liquid Web, my web host, has their own set of data centers out of Michigan, while my other services either didn't use AWS or had backups. Ellipsus, the collaborative word processor I use, didn't go down. Nor did Discord.

But not everyone had backups, as here we are.

If there is one thing that this incident has told us, it's that we have our eggs in too few baskets.

The fact that one company can go down, and take 1,450,000 (1.45 million) customers down with it says everything that we need to know about technology in this current age. It's too centralized, and there are too few players running the shots.

Note that I'm not even talking about the AI industry, even though huge at the moment. I'm talking about how everyone is essentially reliant on Amazon, and other companies to provide their technology. Google Cloud, Azure, Amazon, Oracle, these huge companies provide services and the customers don't realize that they should be doing more due dilligence and ensuring that they can survive if one of the big ones go down.

The fact that Grubhub, United Airlines, and Canvas, three companies affecting millions of unique users on a day-to-day basis can both be impacted by the same thing and cause their operations to go tumbling down independently should be more than enough to send alarm bells ringing inside anyone's head.

Alongside this thought process: it does not help that many companies are choosing to lay off their engineers in favor of AI, which can only operate under a specific set of parameters. So many customers even though it wasn't them who caused the issue, find themselves flailing at not knowing what was going on.

I am not advocating nor defending Amazon and its cloud operations. But there's a certain point where you need to also look at the customers for not having contingency plans in place, or at the very least not all use the same thing.

Originally, I was going to write about how we're all screwed by only using one cloud provider and that companies should really be trying to branch out and have backups or their own systems so that something like this on such a global scale can't occur again.

But that's not the world we live in. Many people will say that you can't just not use the most reliant platform of them all.

Fine, but I can write about how we are becoming too reliant on technology and 3rd-party cloud providers as a whole. So take that!

It is midterm season at my school, or at the very least the end of it. I know many people whose exams and assignments were impacted by the unavailablity of the platform. If we are paying all of this money, then technology should not make a difference for a day, but it did. I couldn't access my textbook and learning resources. I should be able to access it 24/7 (at least during the semester).

Another notable example is of restaurants. There were a few articles that mentionred how restaurants had to entirely close up shop because they couldn't accept orders with their point-of-sale system being down. A restaurant should not need to shut down as a result of an internet outage. Food doesn't need internet on its own. But that's the state of the economy that we have installeed over the past few decades. Everything is reliant on SaaS and thenceforth AWS in some capacity.

Yes, AWS was only down for less than a day — and many people would call it bullish on the fact that customers needn't worry about the technical mishaps, and instead point their fingers at someone else. But that's beside the point. If we spend all of our resources outsourcing everything to other entities, then what are we doing that makes us independent?

It doesn't matter at that point, what software it is, or what type of person or industry you may work in, but we are all bound together by the company that everyone uses. Whether we like it or not.

I'm seriously considering officially formulating my niche/thesis that my general-commentary posts would be under. It would be the intersection of technology and culture in collegiate Gen-Z. Of course, this is subject to change. But it's a good start. Nothing is finalized here, we're just in a state of chaos often like Weirdmaggedon. 

You may also have noticed that things may look slightly different. That is because I updated the site to the Divi 5 Public Beta, courtesy of our benovelent overlords. We were down for 8 hours on Friday to ensure everything is set. But I may have missed a detail or two. So if you do find any issues/bugs, please let me know so I can fix them ASAP.

Thanks for reading. See you soon!