So unless you were clinically dead on Monday October 20th, 2025 then you noticed the same thing everybody else noticed: A ton of tech shit wasn’t working. So what happened? AWS (aka Amazon Web Services) had their most important data center region, US-EAST-1 go down hard due to a misconfiguration. It took hours for them to fix this. As if that wasn’t staggeringly incompetent enough, it then took them hours to actually bring everything else of theirs back online. Their customers took even longer.
So many services went down, that it suddenly became possible for people who weren’t IT Fossils to ponder, “What if the tech industry is actually largely comprised of imbeciles?” It’s a fair question and frankly I’m starting to realize that this may actually be the case. Maybe we’ve all really gotten entirely too high on own supply of bullshit, otherwise known as our collective ego.
Let’s get the obvious part out of the way and throw shade where shade is due: Fuck every company with services that went down yesterday, including my own. You suck. You fucking failed at designing tech that wasn’t total dog shit. AWS-US-EAST-1 goes down. It’s infamous for that. Why in the fuck are you still betting the farm on it or on Amazon? Or on Azure (which also goes down like a $3 hooker and actually had its own share of issues yesterday)? Or on Google? They all suck. They all go down. They all fuck up.
But you know what? Every time they pull this shit, I’m thankful. So I don’t blame them. They are giving all of us and all of our customers yet another chance to pull our collective head out of our collective ass for the nth time. We’ve had so many chances to realize it, but the cloud providers just have bigger data centers which are ultimately staffed by at least some of the same error-prone people that your smaller data centers are staffed by. You see what I’m getting at?
Oh you don’t see, well let me spell it out then: People aren’t perfect. People screw up. As long as people are involved, shit will happen. Only when shit happens because of people at your company, you have an opportunity to remediate the issue personally. That’s because you can make sure it gets fixed. You can ensure it never happens again. You can also benefit from the fact that a lack of such scale (like what AWS deals with) will benefit you by reducing the complexity of what it takes to recover and decreasing the time it takes to get things back online and back up to full capacity. Ultimately the point is that you have control in how it goes.
But when this happens at a cloud company, you don’t have shit. You get to sit there and wait. Meanwhile your customers and users get to bitch at you non-stop and your bosses get to glare at you non-stop. You get to sit in the hot seat and you have endure being a powerless little bitch hungrily waiting for one of your abusive junkie parents to bring home maggot ridden leftovers they dumpster dived for… if you are lucky. You have no control. It goes how it goes. But you deserve better, don’t you? Don’t we?
That’s because we are giving up everything, but most importantly we gave up our autonomy. Sure it sucks from time to time. Sure it creates “capital expenses” you don’t want. Sure it requires you to rent data center space or build your own server room, but dammit at least its yours. On the cloud you own nothing. On the cloud if times get tough and you don’t pay that month’s bill, your service will be terminated, your data will be deleted and your configurations will be lost. If that happens with your on-premise configuration, at least you own it. Even if the power company or your ISP pulls the plug due to non-payment, at least you got the hardware and the data stored on them. Side note: Don’t fucking lease your hardware, just buy the shit.
But even if you do insist on being dumb and leasing your hardware, you still have more control. You can hire or train a more talented IT person. But you can’t get Amazon to do that (or more to the point get Amazon to stop treating them like shit so they stop quitting). You can hire a contractor. You can choose your operating system, your daemons and your hardware. Your fate is yours to make.
But yeah none of this matters. Like a bunch of rubes, we’ll probably just go right on paying Amazon (the pusher) to deal AWS (the drug) to us because we just can’t get enough. If the entire industry had to admit we were really really wrong, people might start to realize how full of shit we are. They might stop believing in fairy tales like LLMs (aka AI) being anything other than a very clever and very expensive but ultimately trite parlor trick. We can’t really stop that from happening at this point of course because that hype train left the station quite a while ago… and it’s going to off the rails real soon.
Anyway fuck this industry. It’s staffed by idiots who are actually okay with all of their crap being simultaneously down for an entire day. You can’t boycott them all, can you now? No, we probably can’t. But we really owe it to all of them to try. So with that in mind, I have invented a new hashtag:
#LiveEveryDayLikeAwsIsDown
We deserve better. We can be better. What’s stopping us?