Amazon S3 Is Down ⇥ zdnet.com

I don’t really do hot topical news here, but there are a couple of things I think we can all learn from today’s ongoing Amazon S3 downtime.

The first is that the cheap, scalable computing power offered by S3 has made it a de facto backbone of the web. We’re seeing that today with downtime affecting major services, like Slack and iCloud, as well as all kinds of websites and infrastructural components. This kind of consolidation needs to be broken up with competitive offerings from other providers, something that will be far more difficult to achieve should net neutrality principles be eliminated.

The second thing that we should learn from this is that it’s not a great idea to make a service’s status page dependent on the status of that service.