When Our Techlords Screw Up

Today’s been a bit of a frustrating day. I’m trying to grade papers and midterms, but our online class maintenance system is up and down and extremely slow at best. I also have a labor event this evening where I’ve been invited to sell books as well as participate in the main event. I’ve been trying to set up Venmo so I can sell books to the few people at a labor event who are not ancient. But I can’t get that to work either. The two issues are connected, as it turns out, because we are all at the mercy of our techbro overlords to keep their data systems working and Amazon has totally failed in this task today.

A huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has taken out multiple web services including Alexa, Ring, Reddit, Snapchat, Wordle and many more.

The issues started at around 2.40am ET / 7.40am BST when a large spike on Downdetector showed reported problems with Amazon Web Services – which in turn has taken down many services that rely on its cloud computing power.

The exact cause of the issues isn’t clear, but the Amazon Web Services dashboard showed an “operational issue” in North Virginia, one if its biggest data centers. The AWS dashboard says “engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue” and the most recent post says it is continuing to “apply mitigation steps” for the problems.

We definitely should give these people more power over our lives. And FYI, the university sent the faculty an email telling us that it is the Amazon failure that is making our sites unusable.