A few hours ago, a massive outage in Amazon Web Services, or AWS as it’s commonly known, caused hundreds of mobile applications, communication platforms, and banking institutions around the world to go offline for several hours. Among the affected apps were major companies such as Snapchat, Zoom, and at least two European banks that reported problems processing transactions.
The source of this unexpected failure was located in the “US-East-1” region, where Amazon Web Services manages critical infrastructure for many global services. At least four million error reports were recorded over several hours.
What impact does this have on the daily lives of users and businesses?
The answer is clear: it exposes just how dependent we are on the cloud and on a few key infrastructure providers. When a single link fails, the effects spread widely, from being unable to access social networks to the near paralysis of global banking systems.
This incident serves as a reminder of the urgent need for redundancy, diversification, and contingency planning in technology, to prevent the lights from going out for everyone when the next major failure occurs.