World’s largest cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), was hit by a major outage on Monday (Oct 20), causing connectivity issues and disrupting services for several popular websites and apps. With the entire country celebrating Diwali on the same day, an Indian techie has now revealed how the situation turned into a ‘mayhem’ for them.
In a now-viral Reddit post titled, “Told them not to put me oncall for Diwali..see the mayhem now”, the user revealed that they informed their manager not to put them oncall during Diwali, only to be told they will be working.
“Told my manager last week…not to put me on call during Diwali. I’ll not be able to handle all alone. His words were, relax, nothing ever happens this time of the year,” the techie wrote in the r/developersIndia subreddit.
The outage was caused by a malfunction at one of AWS’ data centres located in Northern Virginia in the United States. The techie said the immediate aftermath of the outage left them scampering.
“Fast forward to tonight. AWS is down. Teams are blowing up. Pager won’t stop ringing. My family think I work for the government because I’m handling some emergency,” the techie said.
“I haven’t even lit a single patakha (cracker) yet, but my whole screen’s glowing red. Happy Diwali, I guess.”
Check The Viral Post Here:
Told them not to put me oncall for diwali..see the mayhem now
byu/firstprincipal indevelopersIndia
‘Messed-up day’
As the post gained traction online, social media users sympathised with the techie, stating it wasn’t their problem and that it was a major outage that had impacted several big companies.
“Acknowledge and ignore. Unless you’re working for AWS, this is what you can do right now,” said one user while another added: “I don’t think so anyone is gonna blame you for it. This outage is huge and a lot of services are down.”
A third commented: “This whole incident just shows why releases shouldn’t be done on weekends. AWS messed things up, no idea what they did this time. Thank god I am not oncall this week.”
A fourth said: “Honestly, what a messed-up day! 8 hours of gruelling oncall, and now my back is aching from sitting all day!”
The global cloud market is dominated by three companies. AWS holds the largest share (roughly 30 per cent), followed by Microsoft Azure (20 per cent) and Google Cloud Platform (13 per cent).
All three service providers have had recent outages, significantly impacting digital service platforms. In 2024, an issue with third-party software severely impacted Microsoft Azure, causing extensive operational failures for businesses globally. Google Cloud Platform also experienced a major outage this year due to an internal misconfiguration.