The moment the presenter realizes S3 is down. #AWS #S3 #Amazon pic.twitter.com/S8gY1J9lrH

— Ian Sherwood (@ian_surewould) February 28, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the plumbing that makes a lot of the internet work, not just for Amazon but for a lot of other big companies – our daily Guidogram email didn’t go out last night because it relied on AWS. It was by one of those cosmic ironies also the day Amazon’s marketing people had decided to call “AWSome Day”. The above video is of a hapless Amazon booster discovering he can’t make his presentation about the brilliance of the AWS cloud because it was down. Even the geek’s website isitdownrightnow.com, used for checking if internet services are down, relied on AWS:

Rivals have not wasted any time, in Guido’s inbox this morning was an offer from Google Cloud Services:

AWS going down for a few hours reminded people that there is no such thing as “the cloud”. There are just other people’s computers…