[I didn't even hear Amazon Web Services was down yesterday (I actually thought this author was writing about the problems they had last year) so it's pretty obvious "they" are keeping that info out of the "news" as much as they can. You can read more about what happened yesterday at the following link: https://www.aol.com/articles/aws-outage-temporarily-disrupts-websites-113150621.html . . . SC]

By Milan Adams - February 9, 2026

It started early - just another Monday morning. You rolled over, hit the alarm, and asked Alexa for the weather. Silence. Your Ring camera was dead. The banking app wouldn’t load. Even your coffee maker’s “smart” setting was useless. You figured it was the Wi-Fi, until you saw the headlines: Amazon Web Services had crashed.

For a few hours, the modern world froze. Flights delayed. Payments stalled. People locked out of their own homes, cars, and accounts. Then, just as fast as it went down, everything started coming back online.

But what happens when it doesn’t? What happens when the fix never comes, when the “temporary outage” becomes the moment everyone realizes just how dependent - and vulnerable - we’ve all become?

For Anyone Paying Attention: The System Just Proved How Fragile It Really Is

Early this morning, Amazon Web Services went down - again. For several hours, the backbone of the modern internet collapsed, knocking out everything from Snapchat and Reddit to airline systems, payment apps, and even Ring home-security cameras.

This isn’t hyperbole, Amazon controls 30% of the global cloud-infrastructure market.

What happened today wasn’t just a “glitch.” It was a wake-up call for a world that’s gotten lazy, dependent, and too damn trusting of big tech. One internal failure inside Amazon Web Services - and suddenly banking apps, airlines, delivery systems, home security networks, and half the entertainment world froze in place. That’s not progress. That’s a single point of failure on a global scale.

People talk about preparedness like it’s a hobby. But this is why it matters. When one company’s servers hiccup and millions of people can’t communicate, shop, or even unlock their doors, it shows how fragile the entire digital foundation has become. This is about a culture that’s forgotten how to function without the cloud holding its hand.

One Company Pulled the Plug - and Everyone Felt It

At around 3:11 a.m. Eastern, Amazon’s U.S.-East-1 data region went down, taking huge portions of the web with it. Within minutes, major platforms started crashing. Snapchat, Reddit, Signal, and Roblox vanished. Airlines couldn’t process check-ins. Banks and payment apps froze. Even Amazon’s own warehouse systems stopped working.

By sunrise, engineers were still scrambling to fix it. The cause turned out to be internal network and DNS failures - the backbone that tells the internet where to find itself. In plain terms: one mistake inside one company temporarily erased access to a massive piece of modern life.

They got it back up, sure. But for hours, millions were blind and disconnected. And if a few lines of bad code can cause that kind of chaos, imagine what happens when it’s not an accident.

The Cloud Isn’t Your Backup - It’s Your Weak Point

Amazon controls about a third of the world’s cloud infrastructure. Add Google and Microsoft, and nearly 70% of the internet depends on three companies. That means your email, your security cameras, your payment app, and probably your medical records all live in the same few server farms.

People like to think of “the cloud” as this infinite, magical place where their data is safe. It’s not. It’s just someone else’s computer, sitting in a warehouse, run by people you’ll never meet, bound by policies you’ll never see. And when that warehouse goes dark, so does your life.

We’ve reached the point where even basic day-to-day living - locking doors, paying bills, reading news - relies on a few private corporations never making a mistake. That’s not security. That’s dependency disguised as progress.

If They Can Turn It Off, You Don’t Own It

This isn’t just about losing access to a game or a website. It’s about control. When every device, app, and payment runs through centralized digital systems, you no longer own anything - you just have permission to use it.

Today’s outage should make people . . .

[SNIP]