You'd be hard pressed to find an online service that isn't associated with AWS in some way.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Sadly, there are some who don't even know it, because they're buying services from someone else that buys them from someone else that buys them from Amazon. So they're currently wondering what the fuck is even going on, since they thought they weren't using AWS.
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I'm pretty sure most of Azure (Microsoft), OCI (Oracle), and GCP (Google) have all been fine.
Bezos is a craven beast but I don't see many companies above with CEOs that I'd feel comfortable babysitting my teenage daughter
The company I work for is an Azure shop. However, our provider for customer 2fa tokens uses AWS.... So still in trouble.
Once Larry Ellison owns TikTok he's going to be babysitting all the teenagers and a whole bunch of other people!
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Sure, but online services can certainly leverage multiple modules, from multiple companies, hosted in multiple places. So maybe your site mostly works fine, but a key aspect of it is broken.
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Lemmy seemed fine, Reddit did not.
Lemmy seemed fine
Federated, open source
Reddit did not
Centralized, corporate
That doesnt really have anything to do with this issue. Lemmy can absolutly be hosted in AWS via ECS (or EKS if you love Kubernetes). Hell, it could be hosted directly on EC2 if preferred.
Federation as a whole is more resilient because each operator can chose whatever hosting solution they prefer. But if your particular server happened to be hosted in AWS in the useast1 region; your shit was gonna be a bit busted.
Amen to that, good thing though. Got me to learn what Lemmy was. Apparently I've been under a rock.
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Walmart.com would likely work fine, as they are rabidly anti-Amazon, especially AWS. They don't even want their SaaS vendors using AWS under the covers for them.
Can confirm, about 10 years ago, the company I worked for migrated to AWS, and I managed the transition. We planned everything meticulously so that there would be no downtime, and used it as excuse to fix a lot of tech debt. No one was supposed to even notice the cutover, and when we did it, I expected the only feedback to be that things seemed faster and were working as expected. A few hours later, we get a complaint from an Account Manager for Walmart that they can't access the platform at all. There was a lot of confusion and back and forth, turns out their IT department had an allow list or something in the corporate DNS to not resolve to AWS owned IPs unless approved. We eventually got them to add our domain to their allowlist, but it seemed insane that they would spend the effort to implement and maintain that level of control.
Amazon and walmart are competitors
Totally, I understand that, but seemed to be an extreme measure they are inflicting on their employees that doesn't really change anything. It'd be like if ExxonMobil didn't allow their employees with company cars to fill up at a Chevron station.
It'd be like if ExxonMobil didn't allow their employees with company cars to fill up at a Chevron station.
That is likely very much the case. When you drive a company vehicle, you have a fuel card for fill-ups that is for a particular chain and doesn't work anywhere else.
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It's funny aws report didn't mention 40% stops were replaced by AI. https://blog.stackademic.com/aws-just-fired-40-of-its-devops-team-then-let-ai-take-their-jobs-d9db9d298bfa
I brought down all my department's services to take a day off and blame it on Amazon. Next year when negotiating a raise/budget increase, I'll point to this incident and take credit for migrating us off AWS after six months of in-person training classes (either in places I haven't visited or would like to see again) and another six months of hard work in the office (napping in the server room).
2026 is looking pretty good already and I definitely won't regret tempting fate by saying that.
great idea! show us your nap setup! sitting or lying down?
Legendary.
It's sad that none of these people you deal with don't know what service they use or vendors they deal with? That sounds fantastic for you, scary for everyone else.
The really stupid thing is that even if you weren't in AWS east us 1 you were still boned because that is where AWS does it's service authentication.
I love it when Cloud companies pretend there are "serverless" services that are "location-transparent"
You know, they sell this crap to governments and have to follow compliance regimes like FedRAMP but yet... this happens
But the only way to do this is to have a CSO willing to invest heavy in red-teaming -- for attacks of every kind the team can brainstorm -- and a CEO willing to spend the $$ and attention to get their recommendations implemented.
I just want AWS, Azure, Google, & Cloudflare to go down at the same time.
And maybe stay down.
If a nation wants to go to war with the US ... this is how they do it, they just shut down one, two or all of these systems down and watch the country go crazy. It wouldn't destroy the country, just disrupt it enough to make them go nuts and then do more things to them in other ways.
It's amazing when you think about it, first the US invested in heavily defending and arming itself in the 60s, 70s and 80s ... then it spent billions more in the 90s and 2000s to try to come up with ever more inventive ways to screw itself from the inside.
No. Everyone always focuses on the flashy stuff like datacenters but the truth is that the most vulnerable, overtaxed, and underfunded weak-spot for the United States is the electric grid.
Yup. Most of our core electrical infrastructure is over 100 years old now. And thanks to a combination of NIMBYism, profiteering, and the anti-nuclear brigades, we're not likely to see that change any time soon.
I'm pretty convinced that if we did have a complete grid failure, we wouldn't be able to complete a cold start.
Too many people would be pushing for their section to be started first so they could short the market first.
Edit: my proofreading sucks
Doesn't matter who wants want, the power company has contingency plans and those plans are what is happening.
SOURCE: Worked for Cox after a major ice storm smashed north-central Oklahoma flat. Lived Hurricane Ivan and saw their rollout priorities.
The American dream
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Note to self: Sabotage the US' electric grid.
Which in turn would take down the datacenters too, so same effect, just more severe
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I feel like you got it backwards. Letting them run is doing more damage than turning them off would.
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All of them?
All of them.
A lot of my services were unaffected 🤷♂️
Same.
I think my school might have had a local mirror of their d2l brightspace instance though because it miraculously was still up, but taking multiple minutes to load pages
Same, Canvas is perhaps the most used Learning Management System in the US and they apparently are entirely hosted on AWS East. The real kicker is I had my students midterm due date literally today for two classes. I've been swamped with panic emails (and I made clear my due dates aren't even that important when there isn't a national outage lol).
My head canon is someone wished for a miracle due date extension somewhere in the country and they monkey's pawed AWS into non existence.
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I wouldn't look at it that way. Even companies not leveraging AWS directly will be impacted.
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In my country, a lot of the non-traditional bank apps are still down, with millions of people having lost access to their money. Can't even buy groceries, pay the bills, or anything.
This isn't even a shower thought
My wife and I are at Disneyland today, and their site is down. xD
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