Internet Outage Shows Our Fragile Digital World

Yesterday’s Internet Outage Shows Our Fragile Digital World

On October 20th, a massive internet outage rippled across the globe after Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a failure in its U.S. data centers. Apps like Snapchat, Venmo, and even government services went dark for hours. The cause was traced back to a DNS error, a small glitch in the “address book” of the internet that had big consequences.

This outage is a reminder of how dependent we are on just a handful of cloud providers. When one fails, it is not just a website going offline, it is businesses losing sales, people missing payments, and cities potentially losing access to essential services.

For communities like Schenectady, this is a wake up call. We need stronger digital resilience, backup systems, and local safeguards to keep vital services running no matter what happens at the global level. Yesterday proved that reliability is not only about roads and bridges, it is also about our digital infrastructure.