We live in a world where, overnight, everything can just click and shut down completely. That world would feel like an apocalypse, without screens, without connections… Everything would go back to how it was fifty years ago.
And in a time when we can’t seem to live without being connected, something happened. It was the early morning of October 20, 2025. Millions of people opened their eyes as they did every morning, checked their phones, and nothing worked. What?!!
A global outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) (the system that supports much of the internet) left the (digital) world completely frozen for ten hours…
The crash that froze the digital planet
According to Amazon, it all started with a failure in their data centers in Northern Virginia, and that error turned into a chain collapse that affected more than 1,000 companies and over 8 million users.
Platforms like Spotify, Zoom, Snapchat, and Reddit stopped working; in countries like Mexico or Colombia, banks were paralyzed, no transfers, no payments, no online systems. A complete disaster for anyone who didn’t have cash on hand…
“It was like a digital traffic jam. Everything got stuck; the data couldn’t be processed in time”, explained a systems engineer.
And yes, it was ten hours of agony until the system recovered, but one question remained: the digital world stops, and we have no plan B.
Our technological dependence
Just 30 years ago, the idea that a server failure could halt flights, hospitals, or banking transactions would have sounded like a joke, but today? Today, all it takes is a couple of servers “sneezing” for half the planet to panic.
During the blackout, companies couldn’t issue invoices, hospitals delayed surgeries, and users were completely disconnected.
“It has never been so obvious that we’re hanging by a digital thread”.
And they were right. We depend on data centers that, ironically, are concentrated in just one part of the map.
AWS: the invisible giant
Amazon Web Services is the engine behind thousands of companies (from the smallest to the largest corporations), streaming, social media, e-commerce, online banking… everything runs through its servers.
Too many baskets, too few eggs
The collapse has reignited a debate: four companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle) control more than 80% of the global cloud. What happens if one of them fails? Well, we’ve just seen it.
“It’s not about eliminating the cloud” explained a cybersecurity analyst, “but about building more clouds. The future can’t depend on a single doorway”.
Experts agree that the solution lies in diversification, creating local infrastructures and not leaving everything in the hands of one giant, but will big companies really want to diversify their operations? Hmmm…
Promises and warnings
After the scare, Amazon promised to implement new security and redundancy measures to prevent another similar failure, but many people are now thinking about how vulnerable we are without an electronic device in our hands.
Everything is now, everything is instant, and we become fragile when we lose that immediacy. Maybe we’re not at all ready for a world that runs entirely on our screens… right?
A technical failure made us realize that the world keeps spinning (as we know it) because a couple of companies control it, but if they fail (or decide to fail), we’re just fish drowning in a tank. What would happen if one day Amazon never turns back on?