It’s happening again.
DownDetector is lighting up as users across the globe report problems with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Discord, and several other major online services.

This wave comes just days after Amazon’s massive AWS outage, which took down portions of the internet for hours — not because data was lost, but because nobody could find it.

When the Internet Forgets Where Everything Is

AWS, the backbone for a huge portion of the web, suffered a major disruption on Monday when its Domain Name System (DNS) went offline. DNS acts like the internet’s phone book, translating human-friendly domain names (like amazon.com) into IP addresses computers understand.

During the outage, Amazon’s DynamoDB and EC2 services were unreachable, effectively separating apps from their data. As one expert put it, it was as if “large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”

Amazon quickly restored service within a few hours, advising customers to clear DNS caches to help reconnect systems. But this wasn’t just an isolated glitch — it’s part of a worrying pattern.

Why These Outages Keep Happening

At a glance, each outage looks like bad luck: a DNS hiccup here, a routing issue there. But zoom out, and a trend emerges — increasing complexity and automation without matching oversight.

More companies are relying on AI to write, test, and even deploy infrastructure changes. The upside is speed. The downside? Less human validation and fewer sanity checks before those changes go live.

When an automated process — or worse, an AI-generated configuration — updates something like DNS routing or authentication logic, there’s no instinctive pause to ask, “What will this break?”

Even a small AI-generated syntax error in a DNS rule or load-balancer config could knock thousands of sites offline instantly.

The Real Lesson for IT Pros

AI isn’t the enemy here — unvalidated automation is.
Cloud environments like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are more interdependent than ever, and when something fundamental like DNS falters, the ripple hits everyone.

For IT teams, a few steps can make all the difference:

• Track AI-assisted commits separately in version control.
• Require human review before AI changes go to production.
• Test rollback paths regularly — don’t assume automation will catch itself.
• Document DNS and routing dependencies; they’re often invisible until they fail.

Because when half the internet goes down, it’s not just one company’s outage — it’s a shared failure of visibility.

Final Thought

AI is rewriting the way we build and deploy systems, but it doesn’t replace the judgment of experienced engineers.
The cloud is only as reliable as the people — and processes — behind it.
And as we’ve seen this week, the price of skipping that final validation step isn’t just downtime. It’s global amnesia.

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