So this morning I was trying to check whether a package I ordered was actually going to show up before Christmas (spoiler: still dont know) and the Amazon app just... sat there. Spinning. I figured it was my wifi, restarted the router like a caveman, still nothing. Then I saw people on Twitter posting screenshots of Disney+ throwing errors, Venmo not loading, and my own Ring doorbell app telling me it "couldn't connect to your device," which, fine, but I was standing right next to the door.
Turns out it wasnt my wifi. AWS had a big outage today centered on their us-east-1 region in Virginia, which is the one that basically half the internet quietly depends on without anyone really thinking about it until mornings like this. Amazon's own retail site got hit, their delivery driver app reportedly had drivers stuck unable to start their routes, Ring cameras went dark for a lot of people, and a pile of other apps that have nothing to do with each other on the surface (Coinbase, Chime, some food delivery apps) all started acting weird around the same window this morning.
I think the thing that gets me every time this happens is how invisible the dependency is until it isnt. You dont think about the fact that your doorbell camera, your banking app, and some random SaaS tool your job uses are all quietly renting space in the same handful of buildings in northern Virginia. It's not like there's a little label on the Ring app that says "powered by AWS us-east-1, please enjoy responsibly." You just find out when your coffee doesnt make itself because the smart plug cant reach the cloud to know it's 7am.
Small aside: my coffee maker is on a dumb outlet timer now specifically because of a morning almost exactly like this one, a year or so back, when my "smart" plug decided the cloud was more important than making coffee. I was smug about that this morning. Smug and caffeinated while half of Twitter was refreshing Disney+.
This blog, for what its worth, runs on a cheap little VPS that has nothing to do with Amazon, and it did not even blink today. Which feels almost funny to say out loud, like bragging that your bicycle didnt get stuck in the same traffic jam as everyone's Tesla. There is something to be said for boring infrastructure that you actually understand versus infrastructure so big and abstracted away that when it hiccups, seemingly unrelated corners of your life go sideways at the same time.
The bigger irony is the timing. This is peak online shopping season, right after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the exact stretch where Amazon wants its checkout flow working flawlessly, and instead a chunk of the morning got eaten by their own infrastructure tripping over itself. I dont know the internal cause yet and honestly by the time anyone writes it up properly it'll probably be some cascading networking issue, those outages always are. It's never one dramatic thing, it's some internal system that manages other internal systems getting overwhelmed and then everything downstream just waits politely in a queue that never clears.
Anyway. My package status page eventually loaded again a little before lunch. Still says "in transit," so who even knows. The doorbell came back too, caught a squirrel on the porch at 11:40am like nothing happened.
What I keep coming back to is that none of the affected apps did anything wrong today. Ring didnt ship bad code, Venmo didnt push a bad update, Disney+ didnt do anything different than any other Tuesday. They all just happened to be tenants in the same building when the power flickered. Worth remembering next time some product blog tells you cloud infrastructure means you never have to think about uptime again. You dont have to think about it, until one random Tuesday morning in December when you very much do, and there is nothing you personally can do except wait and drink coffee made by an outlet timer instead of an app.