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The day the cloud caught a cold
If Zoom wouldn’t connect, YouTube froze or your smart home went dumb yesterday morning, it wasn’t just you. Over 11 million people reported issues with more than 2,500 big name apps and services.
The reason? A huge outage at Amazon Web Services, better known as AWS. Let me explain what all this means in plain English.
📦 So what is AWS?
Think of AWS like the engine under the hood of your favorite apps. You don’t see it, but it’s running everything.
When a company like Netflix, Zoom, Snapchat, Fortnite, Coinbase, Ring, Signal, your smart fridge or even Alexa herself needs a place to store data or run software, they don’t build a bunch of servers in their basement. That’s expensive and complicated.
Instead, they rent computing power from AWS, Amazon’s cloud. It’s kind of like how we don’t all own water wells anymore. We simply turn on the tap, and water flows. AWS is the tap for the internet.
💥 What went wrong?
One of Amazon Web Services’ major data centers on the East Coast had a meltdown. Because AWS is the backbone of so much of the internet with $80 billion in annual revenue and 23 million big-name customers, that one failure set off a domino effect.
The root cause? It came down to a glitch in the system that checks whether AWS’s internal tools are running smoothly. Major hiccup.
On top of that, add a DNS problem. DNS is the internet’s phone book. It translates web addresses into the behind-the-scenes numbers that tell your browser where to go. When that breaks, your device can’t find anything, even if it’s still there.
So with AWS’s tools out of sync and DNS stumbling, thousands of apps and websites went down or slowed to a crawl. Talk about a full-on cloud migraine.
🧺 Why this matters
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First, look at the handy AI photo. If only, I’d be so good at multitasking. (lol)
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Image: Airmoto
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Geocaching turns 25, and it’s never been cooler 🎉
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I used to do geocaching with my son Ian. It’s a lot of fun.
🍏 Change app icons on iOS 26: Long-press an empty spot on your Home Screen, tap Edit in the top left and hit Customize. At the bottom, choose Dark, Clear or Tinted icons. You can also switch between small and large icons by tapping the two-square button in the top right of the same menu.
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We may earn a commission from purchases, but our recommendations are always objective.
Fix a frozen computer screen: If your PC freezes, reset the graphics driver by pressing Windows key + Ctrl + Shift + B. You’ll hear a beep, the screen will go black briefly, and the driver will reload. Then press Ctrl + Alt + Delete, open Task Manager and End any unresponsive apps. If all else fails, press the Power button to Restart.
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Geocaching turns 25
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