Most people were affected by, or at least heard about the large internet outage earlier this week. It almost felt like half of the internet was broken, with sites like Netflix, Pinterest, and Spotify out of the water. Read about it here. I noticed it when trying to use Lynda.com. The cause was an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 storage. Unless you are in IT, you may not have realized that Amazon does more than just offer a huge marketplace. They also have cloud services, which powers many, many websites. I’ve used AWS. It is an excellent service and I highly recommend it.
I cringed though when I heard the root cause. Some poor engineer accidentally entered the wrong command, which brought down way too many servers, much more than intended. Human errors like this are the subject of nightmares for those of us that build and care for websites. It happens to everyone, but boy, nothing like having your mistake be so public!