I haven't seen this variation of XKCD 2347 yet. Received from a friend, source unknown.

#xkcd2347 #cloudflare #aws #ai

"Amazon sold cloud-computing services to two Israeli weapons manufacturers whose munitions helped devastate Gaza, according to internal company materials obtained by The Intercept.

Amazon Web Services has furnished the Israeli government — including its military and intelligence agencies — with a suite of state-of-the-art data processing and storage services since 2021 as part of its controversial Project Nimbus deal. Last year, The Intercept revealed a provision in that contract requiring Amazon and Google, the other Nimbus vendor, to sell cloud services to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries, two leading Israeli weapons firms.

New internal financial data and emails between Amazon personnel and their Israeli corporate and governmental clients show that Amazon has consistently provided software to both Rafael and IAI in 2024 and 2025 — periods during which Israel’s military was using their products to indiscriminately kill civilians and destroy civil infrastructure. Rafael purchased artificial intelligence technologies made available through Amazon Web Services, including the state-of-the-art large language model Claude, developed by AI startup Anthropic.

The materials reviewed by The Intercept also indicate Amazon sold cloud-computing services to Israel’s nuclear program and offices administering the West Bank, where Israeli military occupation, population displacement, and settlement construction is widely considered illegal under international law."

theintercept.com/2025/10/24/am…

#Amazon #Israel #Gaza #AWS #CloudComputing #Genocide

As Israel Bombed Gaza, Amazon Did Business With Its Bomb-Makers

The Intercept has learned that Amazon sold cloud services to Israeli weapons firms at the height of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

^{Sam Biddle (The Intercept)}

☁️The recent AWS outage showed how fragile “cloud-based security” can be.

When one datacenter faltered, global communication tools — including Signal — went dark 🌑

🕸️Matrix-based messaging systems kept running because they don’t rely on a single provider.

Resilience = decentralization

Let's invest in open, federated platforms.

#AWS #Signal #Matrix #Resilience #CyberSecurity #Decentralization #OpenSource

A funny case study of the 21st century “software engineering” at its best.

As result of #AWS failure, a number of commercial products stopped working that relied on AWS hosted services. Such as the Eight Sleep Pod beds.

Yes, physical beds for sleeping relied on AWS to work. And it was not some kind of extremely sophisticated “AI” processing, but simple schedule “make warmer”, “make colder”, “raise/lower” etc. All that was controlled through AWS.

When AWS stopped working users started complaining that their beds got stuck in weird positions and users were unable to control them. So yes, a bed say in Netherlands stopped working because it could not retrieve instructions from US server which were sent there by the person physically present on said bed.

And the bonus: each bed sent 20 GB of telemetry data to AWS each month.

Source: x.com/zimm3rmann/status/198049… (on Twitter, sorry)

"The list includes McDonald's, DisneyPlus, Snapchat, Signal, Roblox, Verizon, Fortnite, Venmo, Perplexity, Hulu, Duolingo, Perplexity, Reddit and Coinbase. Even Amazon.com was offline at one point, and some users have also reported that their Alexa smart speakers and Ring doorbells had stopped working.

Banks and even some government websites have been affected"

theregister.com/2025/10/20/ama…

#decentralisation #aws #amazon

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

: Amazon reports DNS issues hitting DynamoDB, leaving services from Roblox to McDonald's struggling

^{Dan Robinson (The Register)}

Way too many bytes in one basket makes for one very big single point of failure. This is the cost of an absurdly hyper-centralised fast-food-like data center culture.

Signal++ down, sucks, but it's seeing fundamentals like banks & public sector services break that stings most.

But hey, maybe this is what it tales to push more govs to actual #datasovereignty, investing in locally owned data centers or building out their team & hosting on-prem

#decentralisation #amazon #aws

Včerejší výpadek AWS zase ukázal, jak moc je internet závislý na pár velkých hráčích.
Stačí jeden region Amazonu a spadne půlka webu – od messengerů po streamovací služby.

A pak se někdo diví, proč má smysl decentralizace – Mastodon, MXChat, celý Fediverse 💬

#AWS #výpadek #decentralizace #fediverse #mxchat

Today's AWS debacle is the perfect example of the reason why in the last few years I started to be less enthusiastic about Signal, and more oriented to federated or even P2P solutions like XMPP and Jami. I wrote about it already:

gagliardoni.net/#im_battle_202…

Signal was down for few hours today, after an outage that affected AWS:

mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/115…

Let's ignore for a second the blind reliance on AWS or any other cloud provider. In a decentralized system, this would not have happened, or at least it would have not impacted so many users.

Yes, I am a cryptographer myself, I know that Signal's encryption is the best. But encryption is not everything. Availability issues, geopolitical troubles, risk of enshittification, limitations on users' freedom to use and control the software lead to a lack of trust, even in a supersecure solution. And I say that with honest admiration for the folks at Signal, who are doing a great job.

May they prove me wrong over and over again.

#signal #im #aws #amazon #privacy #security #digitalsovereignty #selfhosting #fediverse #federation #p2p #enshittification #xmpp #jami #politics #opensource #freesoftware #libre

Meredith Whittaker

2025-10-20 08:00:15

PSA: we're aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.

I'm quite proud of the fact that I usually find out about downtime of #bigtech services from the news.

For years, almost all of my personal online tools have been self-hosted or run in data centres of small regional providers. They aren't immune to downtime, but when they're down, it isn't half the internet.

Monocultures may seem efficient, but they aren't resilient.

#AWS #AWSOutage #Amazon

AWS goes down. Takes down UK Gov login gateway, including HMRC login. What kind of brain-dead idiot decided to base a key government gateway on an overseas cloud service ??

#aws #hmrc #ukgov

Line go up!

#AWS #AWSOutage #SysAdmin

"Use the cloud", they say. "You'll always be online", they say.

#aws #awsdown

Not everyone can or should self-host, but there is a lot of middle ground between self-hosting and putting everything on #AWS.

Federated protocols like #XMPP, #ActivityPub, and #SMTP give you choice.

#Fediverse #Jabber

What a timing: while I'm sitting at a #CloudAbolition workshop, #AWS takes down major centralised services like #Signal, #WhatsApp and #Teams.

People continue happily texting me on @matrix though 💚

There is no single central #Signal server. Signal uses #AWS cloud, plus Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud and Cloudflare, all under US legislation. If any of these clouds goes down or becomes otherwise problematic, chatting degrades or fails.

With #deltachat you can choose #chatmail relays ( chatmail.at/relays ) which distributes the risk across a wider network. We are currently working on the multi-transport feature to finally remove any central point of chat failure chaos.social/@delta/1153621448…

Chatmail: Relays

Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!

^chatmail.at

🚨 Another massive AWS outage just took down Roblox, Fortnite, Coinbase, Snapchat, and all Supercell games.

Half the internet has gone dark because of one Big Tech company. This is not innovation, it is monopoly risk.

💡It’s time to choose alternatives.

#GoEuropean #OneClickAway #DigitalSovereignty #AWS #Outage

Amazon CloudFront now supports IPv6 origins for end-to-end IPv6 delivery
by Sagar Desarda and Ravi Avula on 03 SEP 2025

aws.amazon.com/blogs/networkin…

#ipv6 #aws

Amazon CloudFront now supports IPv6 origins for end-to-end IPv6 delivery | Amazon Web Services

IPv6 adoption continues to accelerate worldwide as organizations move beyond the limitations of IPv4 address space.

^{Amazon Web Services}