Amazon Web Services mercilessly mocked with a slew of memes after major websites go down for hours
An hours-long crash of Amazon Web Services sparked a wave of tongue-in-cheek, apocalyptic memes Monday as social media users coped with the disruption of major sites and apps around the world.Posts on X, Reddit and more mocked the meltdown with viral images including Homer Simpson warning “The end is near,” the popular cartoon-dog meme once again declaring amid flames, “This is fine,” and clips asking, “What do we do now?”While most services were back online within hours, the social-media reaction was relentless.Users joked that the collapse of their favorite apps was “the rehearsal for the end of the internet.”Echoing the renowned yellow-dog meme, one user posted an image of panicked office workers insisting, “I’m fine … everything is fine.”Others posted clips of users screaming into phones or mock-photos of engineers surrounded by yellow caution tape in server rooms.The online mockery followed a disruption that began around 3 a.m.
ET and rippled across banks, retailers and gaming platforms before Amazon engineers restored most systems shortly after 5:30 a.m., according to the company’s service-status page.Amazon said the incident stemmed from an “operational issue” affecting multiple services “in the US-EAST-1 region,” with a massive data hub in Northern Virginia linked to the crash.In an update, the company reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services” and said engineers were “actively working on both mitigating the issue and fully understanding the root cause.”By early morning, Amazon said most websites and apps relying on its cloud were working normally again while staff continued “to work through a backlog of queued requests.”The two-hour outage left millions of users unable to log in to platforms including Roblox, Snapchat, Ring, Fortnite, Hulu, Venmo, Coinbase, WhatsApp, the Starbucks app and Microsoft 365.The British government’s official website and online tax portal also went dark...