Today felt like playing digital whack-a-mole.
I’d fix one thing, and another would crash. Email down. Analytics gone. A marketing platform blinking out mid-campaign. At first, I thought it was just me — the kind of bad tech karma that follows you when you need a break the most.
But it wasn’t me. It was AWS — Amazon Web Services — collapsing under its own weight.
And just like that, half the internet went sideways.
The irony of it all is that AWS doesn’t just power Amazon. It powers almost everything: banking sites, small business tools, streaming platforms, and marketing systems like mine. When AWS goes down, the ripple effect doesn’t just hit big tech — it hits people. It hits creators, entrepreneurs, and every business quietly running on borrowed infrastructure.
The Day the Internet Forgot How to Breathe
I spent the day hopping between systems, checking dashboards, messaging teams, and apologizing for things completely out of my control. It was exhausting — not because of the work, but because of the helplessness.
When one giant like Amazon hiccups, thousands of us choke.
Businesses, banks, startups, and creators — we all freeze.
It’s wild how something as invisible as “the cloud” can suddenly feel like quicksand.
We talk about the cloud like it’s this perfect, infinite safety net — but really, it’s someone else’s building with our name on the lease. And today, that building flickered.
There’s no real fail-safe.
And maybe that’s what scares me most.
For all the talk about innovation and resilience, we’ve built an online world that can crumble in an instant because too many of us rely on one company to keep the lights on. The AWS outage reminded us that the internet isn’t an endless sky — it’s a skyscraper balanced on one server room.
The Empire We Built on Someone Else’s Server
I’ve always believed in technology — my entire career lives online. But today reminded me how fragile it all is when one company owns the backbone.
AWS is in everything — our apps, our websites, our banking systems, our backups. It’s convenient, sure. But when convenience turns into control, we lose something essential: freedom.
We’ve let one company hold too much. Not out of greed — out of habit. Out of comfort. Out of “this is just how things work.”
But when one provider goes down and the internet tilts with it… maybe it’s not innovation anymore.
Maybe it’s just monopoly with better branding.
And here’s the hard truth: as long as Amazon Web Services dominates the cloud, the entire digital economy is one outage away from chaos. That’s not efficiency — that’s fragility disguised as progress.
The Day Convenience Broke Us
By the end of the day, after chasing outages and sending “we’re aware of the issue” messages like confetti, I just sat back and laughed. The absurdity of it all. The irony that in our most “advanced” era, we’re still one crash away from chaos.
We’ve traded resilience for convenience.
Independence for integration.
Security for speed.
We don’t need faster. We need fail-safe.
We don’t need bigger. We need balance.
Technology should make us more resilient — not more dependent.
Until we build diversity into our digital foundations — multiple clouds, multiple providers, real redundancies — we’ll keep living this cycle. One outage, one apology, one reminder that convenience always comes with a cost.
When The Clouds Clear
Tomorrow, everything will probably look normal again. The dashboards will turn green, the emails will flow, and the internet will hum like nothing ever happened.
But I won’t forget today — the helplessness, the chaos, and that sinking feeling that we’ve built a world that can’t breathe without Amazon.
The cloud isn’t broken. It’s just over-owned.
And maybe this outage was the universe’s quiet way of saying: build better.
Because when the sky cracks open and the systems fall apart, the question isn’t “Who do we blame?”
It’s “Why did we trust one company to hold the sky?”
— Marji J. Sherman
🔍 SEO Metadata (Recommended for marjijsherman.com)
Meta Title: When One Cloud Holds the Sky: Why the AWS Outage Is a Bigger Problem Than We Think
Meta Description: The AWS outage didn’t just break websites — it exposed our dangerous dependence on Amazon’s cloud. Here’s what it says about our digital world, and why we need to build a safer, more resilient internet.
