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Last week’s internet outage affected many nationally and locally.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Amazon cloud computing company, supports a wide swath of the publicly available internet, and they announced outage reports began to significantly increase at about 2 p.m. ET, though they remained elevated throughout the day. Ongoing problems affecting a slew of popular online applications, including Venmo, Microsoft Outlook, Zoom, Snapchat, and Lyft, DownDetector, caused problems for many.

Outages were also reported for Amazon, as well as its Alexa assistant and Ring cameras. After a series of updates on technical matters, AWS at about 5:22 a.m. ET said it had applied “internal migrations” that were leading to “early signs of recovery” from some services using AWS. Monday’s outage even blocked some people from scheduling doctors’ appointments and accessing banking services. Monday’s outage had such a widespread impact because many companies rely on cloud providers for the backend functions that support their businesses, such as virtual server space, storage, or developer tools.

What if an outage took down the AI tools that doctors were using to help patients, or that companies used to help facilitate financial transactions? That could cause a complete catastrophe and chaos. It may be a hypothetical scenario today, but the tech industry is promising a rapid shift toward AI “agents” doing more work on behalf of humans in the near future. If you think it’s bad now, it’s only going to get worse. That could make businesses, schools, hospitals, and financial institutions even more reliant on cloud-based services.

Place of the Week

Apple Barn Orchard and Winery on Sugar Creek Road in Elkhorn is a great spot for all fall activities.