AWS North Virginia Outage Exposes the Fragility of Our AI-Dependent Infrastructure
Amazon’s North Virginia data center went down today, and suddenly thousands of companies remembered that “the cloud” is actually just someone else’s computer—and sometimes that computer catches fire. The outage, which Reuters reported as largely resolved, knocked out a significant chunk of US East 1, AWS’s most densely packed region. This isn’t some boutique startup’s infrastructure we’re talking about. This is the backbone that runs Netflix, Slack, Airbnb, Robinhood, and countless enterprise applications that millions of people depend on every single day. For several hours this morning, the internet felt noticeably thinner. ...