Funny. My Jellyfin instance is working fine. 😏
Looks like it was an Amazon AWS outage. Just geos to how how vulnerable the Internet is as it becomes ever more concentrated into the hands of the tech giants.
As someone who works in tech I occasionally point out to people that if Jeff Bezos decided to go full supervillain he could hold the internet hostage. If you disabled AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud individually the cascading failures on the various systems would take weeks to fix, which we might not have with a supply chain collapse. Genuinely, I think there’s a real chance it could trigger the collapse of human civilization
The mindblowing part of it for me is that a company the size of Disney don’t seem to have the appetite to own and run their own servers.
These are the same people that managed to get two counties redistricted so that they could own their own city, and to this day literally buy the entire electorate by giving housing only to people who vote the way they’re told to.
They’re being run by accountants, and one thing accountants hate is paying people to do a job, its always “far easier” just to pay a company for that.
Can’t even launch docker containers because auth.docker.io is down too.
Arrr no!
Anyway…
Thats what happens when a single company controls the flow
Is this why kerbalx.com is down?
but how? isn’t all that stuff all up in the cloud? The cloud is great, right?
cloud’s gone
AWS outage. Basically Bezos went down on all his customers.
Whooosh
Oh no!
anywaymy jellyfin didn’t go down
Using it right meow. Didn’t even know this was happening till I saw this post.
Neither did mine :)
Mine did… Although it’s completely unrelated to AWS.
Kodi is pretty reliable…
if the internet is down you wouldnt be able to post this
Good.
Why?
Maybe it will spur us to make the internet more decentralized like it was supposed to be.
Why not? Fuck Bezos.
Basket, dropped
Eggs, broken
Signal seems to be down as well?
Its back up now but that’s because Signal uses AWS.
I like signal and use it daily, but it is very strange that an app built for privacy and security doesn’t let you self host. I wonder about the reasoning behind that sometimes.
I think it’s more questionable that it uses AWS
It appears to be resolved now? I’m able to message people.
It’s working on my end as well!
Oh no! Wait I don’t watch shows anyway.
Why do these companies still sign with AWS? Didn’t they learn from the last two major outages in us-east? To say nothing of the deceptive business practices to obfuscate service utilization to overcharge businesses?
My guess, the CFO showed that using AWS saves the company a few cents to a fraction of a cent per what ever unit they measure by. Those few cents to a fraction of a cent add up when multiplied by the millions or hundreds of millions of units and that savings makes the CEO look like they are more profitable and can give shareholders more profit.
When everything is about the quarterly results and the need to always show growth so the board and shareholders don’t fire you, you’ll cut corners and take the risk, as long as it has the potential to make you look good.
Bro casually and respectfully explaining enshittification over here.
Airlines were one of the first to enshittify this way in the modern age. I think a lot of the current executives took this story to heart IMO.
I’m dead tired and can’t think of a way to say this without sounding arrogant, seriously my brain is fried right now, so I’ll just say I take that as a compliment and thank you.
For these large businesses, I imagine they get favorable deals, and all the executives probably know each other and scratch each-other’s backs. For smaller businesses, AWS can decrease time-to-market, it’s easy to find people who are already familiar with it, and is seen as less risky than going with some smaller provider. Though, I hate the “cloud” with a passion, and whenever I’m given the choice, I avoid it. It’s quite a bit cheaper in the long run to avoid cloud providers too. On one long project I worked on, we hadn’t had downtime on any of our VPSs longer than a couple minutes over the course of 8 years.
No system is perfect.
Yes, and? Things can be better.
Sure, but perfect?
No one’s asking for perfect. But a better system would account for outages, which we’ve seen plenty of so far. How’s that saying go? Don’t let perfect be the enemy of progress? It’s out of reach for a reason.
AWS has outages. So the answer to your question is obvious, AWS is not an advantage over any other solution.
Can you name a more reliable alternative? With citations?
Because every major cloud provider has outages. On prem clouds also have outages. Everyone does.
Can you name a more reliable alternative?
Stop using hyperscalers. Then when an outage does occur, it doesn’t take down half the internet, and instead only affects a much smaller subset of services.
Problem is that as a provider, if you are sure you are confident you’ll get hit by an outage at some point anyway, it’s actually better for you if a bunch of other big names are brought down at the same time.
Instead of “that one service sucked”, the story is “aws sucked”. If it happens too much people will more widely say “ok they suck for using aws”, but for now the transparency gets them treated more like being affected by an unavoidable external condition.
I’m grateful a lot of sites I like didn’t use aws, but I’m not exactly a common demographic and even I won’t know if she is the services even move or not until another such outage.
Okay, you know those have outages too right?
Like sure, it wouldn’t be all together like this, but that’s also not a reasonable ask for a lot of big cloud customers without huge investments for not actually anything extra reliability.
Did you read my entire comment? I know it’s more than one sentence, but your entire comment would be irrelevant if you read the whole thing.
Did you miss my point?
Why would a company move away from AWS?
Because everyone has outages…
Why should companies invest tens of thousands of dollars to move?
I read your comment. You basically repeated back what I said.
As for “not actually anything extra reliability”, that’s not true. This is literally the definition of all your eggs in one basket. If all these services were instead spread out amongst smaller providers, there wouldn’t have even been any news about it because it would have affected just a few services. But instead half the internet went down.
Even one of the applications I manage was down because of a single RTE npm dependency used on the forms. This is when we discovered that the npm module wasn’t bundling the whole thing but in fact dynamically pulling the js from a CDN hosted on AWS, because our prod instances kept erroring out for everyone (No, I did not write this application and I’m already replacing the dependency).
The argument isn’t about spending thousands for a lateral shift in reliability, the argument is to decouple everything from a single failure point.
Yes, the argument is about spending money to migrate, because how else do we decouple the single points of failure, if not to migrate away?
Remember, this is a capatistic hellscape. Everything is about money.
One potential advantage of being up while a whole lot of other companies are down is that some customers may end up switching to you during an outage involving the majority of your competitors.
Yes, you’d experience outages on the new service, but where you potentially lose X% of your business (I have no idea what that kind of number looks like - 0.1%? Higher? Lower?), in the event of AWS outage hitting all your competitors, they each lose 0.1% (or whatever) who disproportionately go to you because you were up while they, and other alternatives, were all down.
This potentially advantages the first companies to jump off AWS for a comparable alternative, which is fair sight better than if the advantages only showed up once some minimum of companies left AWS since no one would be incentived to be first.
From a worker point of view, nothing better than to shrug and say “not my hardware” and blame Amazon when your shit is down for two days, and take the opportunity to do some changes you’ve been putting off because they required scheduled downtime.
Nobody is switching businesses because the service they pay for it’s down for a day. If you run an individual service business (restaurant, florist) sure, but no one is seriously switching businesses over this. Reliable long term self hosting is expensive and your uptick of business for that one day won’t make up for it.
Sure, but how much money is that worth to an individual company? Because migration is not easy or cheap. And your not getting more reliability…
It’s not that hard to be more reliable. It just costs slightly more than renting from Amazon.
