Black Monday for the online age?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) crashed and burned earlier this morning, causing widespread outages across the internet and affecting digital hubs like SnapChat, Venmo, and CoinBase, just to name a few, as well as major brands like United Airlines, T-Mobile, and Starbucks, among others.
“The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers,” Amazon said in a jargony statement posted earlier today, before later insisting the outage was “fully mitigated.” Unfortunately for consumers, connectivity issues continued throughout the day.
Gamblers who already placed big-time wagers were in a state of social media panic.
“We’re currently experiencing a temporary outage due to a global issue with an external cloud provider,“ reps for Hard Rock Bet posted to Instagram. ”Our team is working with our partners to bring all Hard Rock Bet products back online as quickly as possible. All wagers already placed remain secure and will be settled according to our house rules. We appreciate your patience — we’ll have you back in the game soon.“
AWS also suffered critical outages in both 2021 and 2023.
The best thing you can do right now is jump on X and tweet angrily. Just kidding, there’s nothing we can do except sit and wait for Big Tech to get its s—t together. That’s the risk of having the bulk our lives (and daily routines) tangled up in the stability of the world wide web.
Probably why my decrepit old Pee Paw still buries his money in mason jars behind the shed.