A Cloud With Commitment Issues
(or: why half the internet had a meltdown and I couldn’t open Canva)
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
It started with Canva freezing. Which, under normal circumstances, I’d call divine intervention, a reminder to stop fiddling with font kerning for the cover of my next short story. But then Spotify glitched. Reddit hung. Even my translation app refused to cooperate.
And because I am a stable and rational human being, I immediately assumed the universe was punishing me for trying to be productive.
Turns out, the real villain was Amazon Web Services (AWS), the corporate deity that secretly holds half the internet hostage, having what can only be described as a public nervous breakdown. According to Ars Technica, a single point of failure in their DNS system sent millions of services into chaos.
Let that sink in. One broken link in the world’s biggest digital supply chain, and suddenly I can’t design a cover to save my life.
The tech gods trip over their own cables
For the non-tech people, DNS is basically the internet’s phonebook. You type “Netflix.com,” it finds the right number and calls the right server. Except this time AWS dropped the phonebook in a puddle, set it on fire, and blamed humidity.
The Guardian said even banks and smart beds went offline. Newsweek reported Amazon’s slow crawl back to “normal operations.” Which is corporate speak for “we duct-taped it and are pretending it’s fine.”
And yes, I’m still bitter. Because my Canva tab, the one with three versions of the title font for my story, kept looping the same cheery error message like an insult.
The chain reaction from hell
AWS’s own regions are supposed to be redundant, meaning one goes down, others pick up the slack. Except when they don’t. Turns out “redundancy” is just marketing for “we hope nothing explodes.”
Meanwhile, Business Insider quoted the Ring founder calling it a “tough day.” Buddy, my Canva refused to load for six hours, we all had a tough day.
Wired pointed out that the outage showed just how fragile our internet actually is. When one company sneezes, the whole digital economy catches the flu. Or in my case, the whole creative process collapses mid-cover draft.
Existential crisis, but make it corporate
The irony is painful. We’ve built this whole sleek, cloud-powered world so I can design a book cover from a café, but one tiny DNS glitch and we’re back to drawing on napkins. Somewhere, an ancient librarian spirit is laughing.
And here’s the funniest bit. Every startup immediately tweeted “we’re aware of the issue and working with AWS.” Translation, “Daddy Amazon broke it, and we don’t know how to fix it without crying.”
AWS themselves released a neat little post-mortem saying they’d “identified the root cause.” That’s cute. So did I, it’s called overreliance on a single tech monopoly that can ruin my art day.
So what did we learn?
The internet is held together by prayer, caffeine, and DNS records.
Canva is not immune to the apocalypse.
AWS is that one friend who insists they’ve “got it under control” as the smoke alarm goes off.
Maybe this is a sign to slow down. Or maybe it’s just proof that the cloud has commitment issues and needs therapy.
Either way, I got my Canva back eventually. The new cover looks decent. The outage left me mildly traumatised but inspired.
Because nothing says writer resilience like rage-refreshing your way through an infrastructure failure.
And now that the bitching and moaning is over, I’d like to take this sacred moment to thank Amazon for their generous contribution to modern civilization, their tireless innovation, and the continued opportunity they give humble writers like myself to publish fine literary works on KDP.
Truly, may their servers stay strong, their DNS ever resolving, and their algorithms blissfully unaware of any connection between this post and my other pseudonym.