Internet crash for two hours: Amazon Web Services outage caused a wave of memes and panic on social media
Kyiv • UNN
A global outage of Amazon Web Services paralyzed dozens of popular websites and applications, sparking a wave of memes on social media. The problems affected services from Roblox to Microsoft 365, but Amazon assured that there was no cyberattack.
A global outage of Amazon Web Services on Monday paralyzed dozens of popular websites and applications, causing a real "meme apocalypse" on social media. Users from all over the world joked about the "end of the internet," posting viral images of Homer Simpson, a dog in a burning room, and panicked office workers. This is stated in the New York Post material, writes UNN.
Details
Problems began around 3:00 AM ET and affected services such as Roblox, Snapchat, Ring, Fortnite, Hulu, Venmo, Coinbase, WhatsApp, Microsoft 365, Starbucks, and even McDonald's ordering systems. For some time, the portal of the British tax service and other government websites were also not working.
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On the Amazon Web Services page, the company reported an "operational issue in the US-EAST-1 region" related to a data center in Northern Virginia. Engineers recorded increased error rates and delays, and later were able to restore most systems.
Despite the quick resolution of the outages, social media was merciless. Hashtags #AWSdown and #internetcrash rapidly gained popularity, and users competed in wit, posting jokes about a "rehearsal for the end of civilization" and collages of Amazon technicians "saving servers from fire."
Experts note that the incident served as a reminder of the vulnerability of global internet infrastructure, which effectively depends on three cloud giants – Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Harry Halpin, CEO of NymVPN, explained to The New York Times that the primary cause was likely a failure in a major AWS data center.
If an entire country's infrastructure depends on a few providers in the US, and anything can go wrong – accidentally or intentionally – that's an extremely dangerous situation.
Amazon assured that there was no cyberattack, and the technical team continues to analyze system logs to definitively establish the cause of the incident.