The Day the Internet Went Dark

Our ancestors had backup mules. We have Downdetector and Grok.

Last week in Costco, while panic-shopping for a week of out-of-town company, a Korean shampoo-and-conditioner set leapt into my cart. It was a splurge I struggled to justify, because I’d just bought a pair of fancy shampoo and conditioner bars that were supposed to be to hair what probiotics are to guts (or something like that).

But I did not like the conditioner bar. In fact, I absolutely hated it. I have long, fine hair, and rubbing this dry slab of candlewax down it was the least satisfying grooming experience of my life. It dragged, tangled, and was about as moisturizing as a saltine cracker. Still, the set wasn’t cheap, so I planned to grit my teeth and suck it up until both bars dissolved into oblivion.

But then—Korean beauty products at Costco. Every beauty junkie knows they’re the best in the world, and finding them in king-size jugs at the best price on the planet felt like a sign. It was the score that tipped the scale and gave me permission to toss the hated bars straight into the trash.

Yesterday morning, when I went to wash my hair, I discovered that the Costco “set” was actually two giant bottles of shampoo. Literally, like possibly three years’ worth. With no conditioner. So, after my shower, I raced to my computer to see if Amazon could rush me the missing half before my hair turned to straw.

I refreshed the page several times and tried a handful of new searches, but Amazon was definitely down (as confirmed by Downdetector). I switched over to X and searched for posts featuring the world’s largest mega mall. Oh, Amazon was having a meltdown, alright. Along with Venmo, Apple Music, Snapchat, Reddit, Verizon, Ring, Roblox, Lyft, Delta Air Lines, McDonalds, Canva, T-Mobile, AT&T, Instacart, Grub Hub, The Wall Street Journal, and about a billion other sites.

Was it happening? Was this Zee Frightening Scenario of a Comprehensive Cyber Attack we’d been promised? And if so, why were X and Downdetector still working? I checked my own website, my husband’s site, AP News. All cruising. ChatGPT—likewise operational—confirmed the widespread outage, although it offered little in the way of an explanation. (“Increased error rates and latencies” sounds more like a symptom than a cause to me.)

Nearly 24 hours after I took this screenshot, the situation was still not, in fact, fully mitigated.

Apparently Amazon Web Services—the invisible scaffolding propping up half the modern world with its cloud services—had had what tech experts sometimes refer to as a moment. Well into the afternoon, the internet itself seemed to forget how to internet.

Snapchat snapped. Apple Music went mute. Netflix chilled—alone. Influencers were forced to wear ‘fits and eat meals nobody would ever see. Banks, airlines, and cryptocurrency exchanges froze like deer in Alexa’s headlights. It was the digital equivalent of the planet’s mom yanking the Wi-Fi router out of the wall and announcing, “It’s family time!”

The outage was traced back to AWS—short for Absolutely We’re Screwed when it goes down. AWS is the plumbing behind everything from Netflix to DoorDash to those creepy* smart refrigerators that will automatically order you more oat milk when you’re running low.

(*Okay, creepy but also kind of cool and could be handy.)

Tech analysts say this is what happens when the internet—originally designed to survive even if individual parts of it went down—now runs almost entirely through a few server farms the size of Rhode Island. It’s like wiring every traffic light, pacemaker, and espresso machine to a single power strip—and then hoping nobody powers the hair dryer and the International Space Station at the same time.

If resting smug face ever becomes a thing, it’ll be modeled after Elon Musk’s mug yesterday.

While Amazon scrambled to “fully mitigate” the situation, Musk took a brief break from tweeting about superchargers to announce that X was unaffected by the outage. “Not us,” he gloated [at 3:45 a.m. Central Time], before using the moment to promote his emotional support AI bot.

Related aside: How long do you guys think it’ll be before Musk has a kid named Grok?

Let’s all admit, there’s a quiet panic that settles in when we get booted offline. There’s no checking your bank balance. No placing your Starbucks mobile order. No way to prove you’re right in an argument. No finding the perfect meme for your Substack. We’ve built an entire civilization balanced on a server rack, and when it blinks, we forget how to function.

A dozen or so times yesterday when writing this piece I refreshed my news feed; each time I did, headlines would roar, “Amazon says its systems are back online again after connectivity issues… but reports of problems continue.”

Twenty-seven hours later, I’m here to tell you that reports of problems continue.

*IMAGINE ME CLICKING ON A DOZEN DIFFERENT WEBSITES THIS MORNING AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM BEING DOWN—EXCEPT CNN, BECAUSE THAT’S NOT TERRIFYING. I TOOK A SCREEN RECORDING, WHICH I WOULD SHARE BUT IT WON’T UPLOAD. OBVIOUSLY.

Analysts estimate that between delayed flights, unfinished purchases, missed Zoom meetings, inaccessible services, and frozen trading platforms, the impact of the little digital blip will be in the billions of dollars. And that was as of yesterday—when they thought they had it all dialed in.

It’s wild to think our ancestors figured out fire, farming, and fancy indoor plumbing—but somehow when they passed down all of that knowledge, we missed the most basic principle of survival: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Our grandparents stocked canned goods for nuclear winter. They had contingency plans. If the crops failed, they fished. If the ox died, they hitched the mule—or dragged the cart themselves. If their sourdough starter fizzled out, they knew which neighbor had a hearty one. We lose internet for ten minutes and we forget how to make toast without a tutorial video.

Maybe this is just digital Darwinism at work. The strong will adapt, learning to read a map and make eye contact with strangers again. The weak will wander around helplessly, holding their dead phones in the air like divining rods, praying for a signal (or a sign). We’ve engineered our lives for maximum convenience and minimum competence… and now we’re shocked to find out that when one company sneezes, the whole planet catches the flu.

Does the thought of disconnection freak you out? Did you learn anything about the internet or yourself in the last day? Share your thoughts and epiphanies in the comments.

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