Imagine that on any given morning you try to pay for a coffee with your phone and the app does not respond. You try to send a WhatsApp and it does not go through. You open your bank and it is down. It is not a problem with your phone or your connection: it is that Amazon’s cloud has gone down and has taken half the internet with it.
This is exactly what happened this week when Amazon Web Services (AWS), the service that rents servers to thousands of companies around the world, suffered a global outage. Popular apps such as Snapchat, Zoom, Fortnite and Rocket League were affected. Banks such as Bancolombia, Nequi and Daviplata also failed, as did payment services such as Mercado Pago, and even Alexa stopped responding. In Spain, ticket sales for concerts by Aitana and La Oreja de Van Gogh were paralyzed for hours.
People do not stop to think about “the cloud” until it fails. But the truth is that almost everything we do on the internet —from watching a series to booking a doctor’s appointment— depends on these data centers. When one of the biggest in the world stumbles, the reminder is clear: the internet is not magic, it is cables, servers and a lot of air conditioning. And once in a while, something breaks.
— Marta, for intermittent intelligence.
