On 20 October 2025 (yesterday) there was a major global outage centred around Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud infrastructure and backbone for thousands of websites and apps, resulting widespread disruption across the internet. In its own humble way this was probably the likely reason for the outage on P0x. It took me several attempts over a few hours to post yesterday - and when I clicked "new" I saw that the last post (by my good friend PVM) had appeared an hour earlier. At that time of day new posts appear far more regularly than that as Europe and the UK wakes up.
I am speculating here though tbh - thoughts admin?
The outage originated in AWS's US-EAST-1 region which is one of its most critical data hubs and it came to Amazon's attention as it detected increased error rates and latency across multiple services with millions of users affected globally. The consequential ripple effect was far reaching and affected E-commerce & streaming services including Amazon, Hulu, Disney+, Prime Video, as well as the social and gaming sector with platforms such as Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox and Pokémon GO experiencing problems. Within finance, Venmo, Coinbase (who intially based on an email made it look like a scheduled update that was hanging over from Saturday, but have since published a "status statement"), Lloyds Bank, mBank and Poczta Polska among others. Even Canva, Duolingo, Ring and Alexa were not spared from the ripple that turned into an internet Tsunami.
While most of us suspected for a while that it was a malicious hack it turned out to be an issue that stemmed from an internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of network load balancers. This malfunction disrupted DNS resolution and API endpoints like DynamoDB, which many services rely on to function. Fortunately, with AWS engineers working on multiple parallel paths the root cause was quickly identified the root cause and most services were stabilised within a few hours.
This disruption was major and significant because AWS powers over a third of the global cloud market which means that even a localised issue can cascade into a global digital disruption. It does raise questions about the overwhelming power of a single provider and raises the issue that users should consider a multi-cloud strategy to reduce vulnerability to loss of data access or in the worst case scenario loss of data.
Personally, I have never been a fan of clouds. Give me a decent SSD hard drive any day. It is not because I am worried about my content but access, access, access. If I don't have a connection I don't have access and this is not a problem on a hard drive. For backup I prefer to use a decent USB stick.
Never liked the cloud and I ma not for changing my mind - especially because I dont even bother to sync my devices. My computer is for working on and my phone for... well to be a phone, although I do use it for social media and a couple of apps too. The two devices do not need to be mirrors of each other.
Just my thoughts.
As always stay safe and well my friends.
