On the 28th February 2017 the cloud went down. Or at least a large section of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) went down, taking a lot of things down with it. The list of affected sites is long but the outage points to a much bigger problem; what does an outage mean when our cites, buildings and homes depend on the cloud? AWS hosts 148,213 websites and 121,761 unique domains, according to Similar Tech. The outage completely downed well known web services like; Adobe, Amazon Twitch, Coindesk, Expedia, FanDuel, FiftyThree, Flipboard, GitHub, GitLab, Fabric (Google owned), IFTTT, JSTOR, Kickstarter, Lonely Planet, Mailchimp, Microsoft HockeyApp, MIT Technology Review, Quora, Square, Talkdesk, Trello, The Verge, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and, ironically, isitdownrightnow.com. Other big names affected in some way include Airbnb, Apple, Pinterest, Snapchat and Time Inc. This wasn’t a power outage, a hack, DDoS attack, or a physical attack. It […]