Amazon Web Services

who else is on-call? let's goooo More on reddit.com

It has nothing to do with climate change or electricity or water being in limited supply. It has everything to do with consolidation of services, systems getting more and more complex and companies wanting to make as much profit as possible. Over the past few decades the internet has become more and more centralized. There is one major company that does what Cloudflare does and AWS host much of the internet. This introduced several single points of failure. In the distant past, if one company went down one website or service was down and many others that offered the same thing stayed up. Now a single thing breaking can take the entire internet down. People used to boast that the internet was build to route around damage and was so resilient as to withstand a nuclear strike. That was when everything was decentralized. Nowadays everything is hanging by the same thread. To make matters worse the people who are in charge of making sure that thread doesn't break are getting fired left and right in the name of cost cutting. Finally you have technologies like DNS and BGP which are inherently single point of failure, mistakes once entered propagate to everywhere. These technologies were designed quite a while ago and never meant to be made do what we make them do today. If we tried to build the internet from the ground up today we would make better choices. So the internet is getting older and more complex and capitalism has made it less robust. More on reddit.com

Multi region redundancy is expensive, complicated and probably not worth it, so many companies don't do it. Combined with the fact that us east 1 is the largest and oldest region, when it goes down, a lot of things go down with it More on reddit.com

When a website has to handle people (users) going to the website and making use of the services on it that requires computers actually processing those decisions and actions by the users. In the past businesses would do this themselves by having dedicated computers (servers) handle that processing. They would have these computers on-premises and have their own IT handle expansion and maintenance of those servers. Nowadays most of the businesses and websites on the internet no longer have their own computers because of the time and investment needed to manage it and just rent the usage of computers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or whatever hosting they choose to use. AWS normally has a 99.999% availability meaning that it normally has like a 5 minute total downtime for the entire year and for the most part they're very consistent about maintaining that availability. When it goes down that means the businesses that rent the usage from Amazon don't have any way to actually process incoming requests to their website and don't have a backup in place (because this usually does not happen) meaning that the websites go down. Huge amounts of the internet including the sites you mentioned use Amazon to host their sites and so when it goes down they also do. More on reddit.com