TECHNOLOGY: Our old friend “network load balancers”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15210077/reality-internet-meltdown-amazon-aws.html

The alarming reality EXPOSED by the global internet meltdown… and why Amazon’s crash is only the beginning

By HARRIET ALEXANDER, US SENIOR FEATURES WRITER

Published: 15:37 EDT, 20 October 2025 | Updated: 08:35 EDT, 21 October 2025

*** begin quote ***

By 11:43am ET on Monday, over eight hours after the first sign of trouble, Amazon sounded optimistic that the end was in sight.

‘We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services,’ the company said. ‘The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.’

They said they were deliberately slowing some services ‘to aid recovery’ and were still ‘actively working on mitigations.’

*** end quote ***

 Having once ran an IT tech support group for AT&T PBXs, I sympathize with the poor souls with an impossible task.  Six 9’s is the standard   —  .999999 reliability — that’s about 3 seconds of downtime per year.  Sometimes you just need to lucky.  And, you better have a fantastic testing strategy since every change that’s introduced into this tech version of Jenga has the potential to bring down the whole shaky stack.

End Users need to plan for those outages which as in this case can last for hours.  

Hopefully we never have one of those Carrington Events (an intense geomagnetic storm on September 1, 1859) which could cripple our civilization.  

— 30 —

Please leave a Reply