Chances are you were hit by internet troubles yesterday. The AWS outage impacted over 2,500 companies and services worldwide — estimated to cost everyone involved roughly $2.5 billion.

And it was all because of one server region in Northern Virginia — a single point of failure took down thousands of companies and essential public services across the globe.

When AWS sneezes, half the internet catches the flu.

Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911

And that happened even though AWS best practice states that companies use server regions closest to the largest pool of end-users of your service. So how did this happen? And did it just expose how fragile the internet actually is? Spoiler alert: Yes. Let me explain.

How did the AWS outage happen?

Amazon has issued a state

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