If you happened to be one of the millions of people trying to order McDonald’s while firing up the old HBO Max only to discover that the interweb was down, you too know what the apocalypse looks like. But while the biblical end times only count four horsemen, Downdetector, a site that monitors web outages, counted 30.
The blame for the outage lies squarely on the shoulders of Akamai, a Massachusetts-based cloud services and content distribution hub. The company said in a tweet sometime between lunchtime and hangry that it was experiencing a “service disruption” and would investigate.
Never one to waste a golden opportunity to throw shade, Amazon Web Services immediately jumped on Twitter to let everyone know the service issues were zero percent their fault. (Thanks for the update AWS.)
Other businesses that went dark during the service halt included FedEx, UPS, Groupon, and Delta, whose customer service department finally had an out for their ninth circle of hell customer service. Several 911 emergency services also went offline minutes before the outage, causing some to speculate the entire shutdown was part of an elaborate heist to steal discount dental cleanings.
Though Akamai was able to restore service within the hour, the latest blackout is adding yet another coal in the fire of cloud diversification. As more and more websites begin hosting their content on just a handful of servers, companies like Akamai become more vulnerable to service failures, either through technical errors or targeted breaches. The trend is leading some to call for spreading cloud services out to a larger chain of networks so outages like these are no longer a big deal.
Speaking of big deal, while it didn’t end up being the end of the world, for us, it was a precious lunch hour we’ll never get back.
Cover Photo: Prostock-Studio (Getty Images)
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