This week the internet face-planted. A outage of us-east-1 on AWS turned into a digital chain reaction and suddenly half the internet was gasping for air. Not because the sky fell. Because one block got pulled and everything leaning on it toppled like a badly stacked Jenga tower. THIS IS PREVENTABLE.
This wasn’t some mysterious hacker in a hoodie moment. It was a reminder that our shiny connected world is held together by a bunch of services duct taped into place. And when a big one cracks, we all feel it.
This isn’t just an AWS problem. The internet has choke points everywhere. The bigger and more centralized these services get, the bigger the blast radius when something goes wrong. Pull one thread too hard and the whole thing shakes. This is a reason why creating "mega services" like Twitter is trying to do right now. Sorry, "X" super cool name...
Most businesses don’t own their infrastructure. They rent bricks from the same wall. When one brick gives, the cracks spread fast.
It’s not just a tech thing.
The internet isn’t a fortress. It’s a shared house. And a shared house means shared mess. What happened in us-east-1 isn’t unique. It just proves how fragile the whole stack is when everyone piles on the same few providers.
Here’s the blunt checklist. No magic. No buzzwords. Just stuff that works.
Stop betting everything on one system.
If your whole operation lives in one cloud or one region, that’s not a strategy. That’s a gamble.
Assume it will break.
Outages aren’t “if.” They’re “when.” Have real backup plans. Not just a Confluence page no one reads.
Talk to your users like people.
When stuff breaks, clear updates beat vague status poetry.
Run your fire drills.
If you’ve never tested your failover, it doesn’t exist. Simulate often.
Spread your dependencies.
One region or one provider going dark shouldn’t take your whole business with it. Build like the failure is already on the calendar.
Yes, AWS had an outage. But the fallout wasn’t just on AWS. It was on everyone who built with no plan B.
This isn’t a “cloud problem.” It’s an architecture problem.
The companies that came out fine weren’t lucky. They built like they knew this day was coming.
The future belongs to the builders who expect chaos and keep moving anyway.
This week the web reminded us who’s boss. Not us. The system.
us-east-1 went down. A lot of companies followed it into the dirt.
But here’s the truth. This is solvable. We don’t have to accept the internet as one big single point of failure.
Build strong. Expect failure. Laugh when the storm hits. Then keep building.
Author: Will Blew, SARVIS AI
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