Today, once again, half the internet went dark not because of a global power failure or a cyber-attack, but because a single AWS region, us-east-1 (N. Virginia), had a bad day.
Perplexity went down. Amazon itself stumbled. Substack, Signal, Fortnite, and countless others vanished into the ether. Even services like Statuspage.io, used by companies to tell their customers “we’re down!”, couldn’t update their own status pages, because they, too, rely on the same broken backbone. It’s the definition of irony.
And it’s also the definition of a single point of failure world.
The Illusion of “Global” Cloud
We like to think the internet is distributed, that it’s everywhere, resilient, unstoppable. But when a data center in Virginia sneezes, Europe, Asia, and Africa catch pneumonia.
That’s because, in reality, the “global” web runs through a handful of U.S. cloud regions, most notably AWS us-east-1, which quietly powers much of the internet’s backbone services.
It’s absurd when you think about it: billions of people’s digital lives hang on one physical location in one country, maintained by one company.
Globalization has, ironically, created the least resilient system imaginable, everything centralized, interconnected, and entirely dependent on a few mega-providers.
Monopoly Clouds and the Fragility of Scale
AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure have grown so large that they’ve become too big to fail yet too fragile to trust.
When they work, they’re beautiful. When they fail, the world stops.
And for all the billions they charge, we’re still here watching mission-critical systems crumble because a DNS issue in Virginia decided it was done for the night. These providers charge a premium, but when it comes to reliability and accountability, the value proposition starts to feel like a bad joke.
Let’s be honest, they don’t deserve the price tags they carry if the result is global chaos caused by a regional hiccup.
The Case for a Hybrid Future
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: companies that moved everything to the cloud have made themselves hostages to these monopolies.
A more innovative, more sustainable approach is to flip the model:
- Run your own physical datacenter (central region) for production workloads.
- Use the cloud for secondary, backup, and disaster recovery.
That way, when the next “cloudquake” hits, your business doesn’t collapse with it.
Imagine a world where every office, every building, every organization runs its own micro-datacenter, small, efficient, locally managed.
Cloud providers could still play a part, offering affordable hardware leasing, long-term equipment rental with buy-out options, and easy cloud-to-local sync solutions.
This hybrid ecosystem would be resilient, distributed, and more human.
The Human Side of Infrastructure
Here’s another point we shouldn’t forget: AI won’t replace the engineers who build and maintain these systems.
Datacenter technicians, network admins, sysadmins, cloud ops, and DevOps engineers are the people who keep the digital world breathing. The more decentralized our systems become, the more skilled humans we’ll need to keep them alive.
So instead of chasing an AI-only fantasy, let’s plan for real infrastructure with real people behind it.
A Wake-Up Call
Today’s AWS outage isn’t just an operational blip; it’s a wake-up call.
A reminder that the cloud is not the sky, it’s just someone else’s computer, sitting in a building in Virginia, running on hardware that breaks, DNS that misbehaves, and humans who make mistakes.
If we want a truly global and resilient internet, we need to stop worshipping monopolies and start rebuilding independence.
Because when the cloud sneezes, we shouldn’t all have to hold our breath.
Written with a bit of sarcasm, a lot of frustration, and a deep love for resilient architecture.
– Ercan Ermis