Posted on 10/30/2025 6:50:35 PM PDT by bitt
As Cybersecurity Awareness Month comes to a close, it ends having given us all a small glimpse into the potential chaos that awaits us if hackers had their way.
A couple of weeks ago, Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage that took down websites, apps, payment systems, and smart-home devices across the globe. The culprit wasn’t a hack — it was a software automation bug in AWS’s internal DNS management. But that’s exactly what makes it terrifying. A simple misfire in one system cascaded through hospitals, banks, airlines, and retailers in minutes.
Now imagine if it hadn’t been an accident. If a hostile actor had deliberately triggered the same domino effect, we’d be calling it one of the largest cyberattacks in history. What started as inconvenience — frozen checkouts, crashed apps, darkened dashboards — could have escalated into economic paralysis. The outage was a glitch. A cyber strike could be chaos.
The AWS blackout exposed what many cybersecurity professionals have warned for years: the modern economy is over-concentrated in a handful of cloud providers. One misconfigured update in a single hyperscale region can ripple through everything from logistics to national defense contractors. It’s the equivalent of building every highway bridge in America from the same steel. Perhaps an efficient process, yet catastrophically fragile if it ever cracks.
That’s why this Cybersecurity Awareness Month should focus less on “strong passwords” and more on resilience engineering. We must diversify workloads, build real failover systems, and treat redundancy as mission-critical infrastructure, not a line item to trim. Because as the AWS event proved, even without a hacker, our systems are already brittle enough.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
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No kidding. I can’t wrap my mind around why anyone thinks it’s a good idea to put everything in the cloud.
Yup. Our wifi was down for almost a week.
I’ve known teachers who put everything on cloud. It’s great until the server goes down and they can’t access anything. I used to put everything on USB and had no problem.
I wrote a paper 50 years ago the problems that dns could cause .
Everybody thought i was nuts
People will eventually understand what the problems with dns are.
It’s a huge point of failure in the whole internet system
People just don’t get it
I heard a report that even manually entering the IP address failed to open the WWW sites. It was bigger than just a DNS failure, apparently.
CAn’t even USE office without data going to cloud.
AGREED! I have a degree in data base design, and I think it’s just crazy to trust your whole future in the internet.
Most of the common sense people in tech that I talk to will say that everything in cloud or on prem is stupid. It’s not a redundancy if it’s in the same place. Have a mix of both and sort them where they work best.
The AWS blackout exposed what many cybersecurity professionals have warned for years: the modern economy is over-concentrated in a handful of cloud providers.
The great Electromagnetic Cleansing is coming. Hubris will magnify it! 🧐
I’m just about last paper doc man standing at my company. If the cloud goes poor though, my projects will still be there 🤠
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