Just picture a mass of people, an enormous crowd, rushing through a door when one person trips, and the entire mass goes down like dominoes.

It shouldn’t be that hard to picture. We’re almost upon Black Friday, after all, and that’s basically how the store entrances are at opening time, anyway.

That was basically the internet yesterday. Between 11:49 PM PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) on October 19 and 2:24 AM PDT on October 20, Amazon AWS—the cloud service that underpins an enormous part of the digital world—went down, and it took a lot of websites down with it.

Amazon’s Massive AWS Outage

My first clue was that my eye doctor couldn’t access their system to order me a new batch of contacts. Then I couldn’t reimburse a friend for dinner on Venmo.

Throughout the day, news sites reported ot

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