AWS outage: A lesson in cloud computing's fragility

View profile for MAXIMILLIEN KOLBE I. Bagira

Startups | Building Digital Products for Sustainable Innovation in Africa

When the Cloud Fell for a Moment On Monday morning, the internet quietly reminded us how fragile it really is. Amazon Web Services the invisible backbone powering everything from banks to airlines, smart homes to streaming suddenly went dark. Within minutes, major apps like WhatsApp, Zoom, Roblox, and even Ring doorbells stopped working. It felt as if the digital world had collectively paused. The cause? A simple software update gone wrong in AWS’s Virginia data center a small API tweak that broke the system helping apps find their servers. One misstep in the “internet’s phone book” (DNS), and millions of services were lost in translation. By the time engineers fixed it, more than 100 AWS services had stumbled. Yet the story isn’t just about an outage it’s about dependency. Nearly everything we touch online relies on a few giant infrastructures we rarely see or question. A single error in the cloud can ripple through the planet. Maybe the lesson is this: in a world built on automation and reliability, resilience still begins with human awareness. #CloudComputing #AWS #TechReliability #DigitalResilience #EngineeringLessons

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