The Atlantic’s Will Gottsegen points out “The Internet Is Going to Break Again.”
Everything is in “the cloud” now, except the cloud is a real place, and it’s in Northern Virginia. Rows and rows of servers stacked in Amazon-owned warehouses across Ashburn, Haymarket, McNair, Manassas, and Sterling make up a chunk of the infrastructure for the modern internet—equipment as crucial as railway tracks and the electric grid. When a technical issue disrupted operations at those facilities yesterday, it was enough to temporarily crash the internet for users around the world.
The incident marked at least the third time in the past five years that Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia facilities contributed to a widespread internet outage. This time, more than 1,000 sites and services were affected, according to Downdetector, costing companies an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars. Venmo users were locked out of their payments, and international banks experienced major blips in their service. People struggled to book urgent doctor appointments and couldn’t access their Medicare benefits. Snapchat and Reddit were down, as were Instagram and Hulu. Ring paused their doorbell cameras; ChatGPT stopped answering.
WaPo’s Leo Sands reports on one microeffect: “Smart beds flipped out during the AWS outage, and so did their sleepy owners.”
[P]erhaps the rudest awakening was felt by those sleeping on Eight Sleep’s high-spec internet-enabled mattresses. As the outage caused cloud servers to fail, people reported being awoken in discomfort by beds that locked in an upright incline, became unbearably warm, blinked flashing lights or even sounded a wake-up alarm.
“That is not the experience we want to provide and I want to apologize for it,” said Matteo Franceschetti, the chief executive of Eight Sleep, which also manufactures and sells internet-enabled mattress covers and pillow covers. In a social media post, he explained that the malfunctions were the result of the AWS outage and said engineers were racing to build an outage-proof mode in the event of a future outage.
Eight Sleep did not immediately respond to a request for further comment early Wednesday. As of Monday evening, Franceschetti said all devices were functioning although some were still experiencing “data processing delays.”
The company’s internet-enabled mattresses allow users to adjust their bed’s temperature between 55 and 110 degrees, elevate their body into different positions, as well as activate immersive “soundscapes” and vibrational alarms. The most advanced product bundles retail for over $5,000, in addition to a yearly subscription costing $199 to $399 that is required to enable the temperature controls.
The malfunctions also highlighted some of the risks in making so many aspects of everyday life dependent on cloud-based technologies, which Alan Woodward, a professor of computing at England’s University of Surrey, said will always be prone to occasional failure.
“Complexity always causes issues,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday. “The more complex you make the functionality, the more difficult it is to understand what will happen when some parts of that whole chain of computing fails.”
Gottsegen’s colleague Andrew Moseman laments a related issue in “My Car Is Becoming a Brick.”
For most of its short life, my Tesla Model 3 has aged beautifully. Since I bought the car, in 2019, it has received a number of new features simply by updating its software. My navigation system no longer just directs me to EV chargers along my route—it also shows me, in real time, how many plugs are free. With the push of a button, I can activate “Car Wash Mode,” and the Tesla will put itself in neutral and disable the windshield wipers. Some updates are more helpful than others: Thanks to Elon Musk and his middle-school humor, I can now play an updated array of fart sounds when an unsuspecting passenger sits down.
But Musk is already starting to leave my car behind. In July, Tesla rolled out a version of Musk’s AI assistant, Grok, to its vehicles. Even as a chatbot skeptic, I could see the usefulness of asking my car for information without having to fumble with my phone. Alas, at present Grok runs only on Teslas made in the past few years, which have a more advanced processor to power their infotainment system. My sedan is simply too old.
Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.
In other words, your car is a lot like an iPhone (so much so that in the auto industry, describing EVs as “smartphones on wheels” has become a go-to cliché.) This has plenty of advantages—the improved navigation, the fart noises—but it also means that your car may become worse because the software is outdated, not because the parts break. Even top-of-the-line phones are destined to become obsolete—still able to perform the basic functions like phone calls and texts, but stuck with an old operating system and failing apps. The same struggle is now coming for cars.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old.
There’s no obvious solution for any of this.
That so much of the Internet—and, thus, modern society—runs on cloud servers provided by a handful of providers is a significant vulnerability. But diversification has its own issues.
That the so-called Internet of Everything has gradually spread brings both tremendous convenience and vulnerability. Most of us get our entertainment from streaming services. If they or our Internet connection go down, we don’t have a backup. That’s only mildly inconvenient and more than made up for by an array of choices that would have been almost unimaginable not long ago. But many of us now have doorbells, thermostats, and other central parts of the home networked. Some even have their refrigerators connected.
Moseman points to a related problem: as more of our everyday technology becomes reliant on connectivity, it becomes obsolescent faster. My Mazda CX-9 is relatively old. Aside from a navigation system that I usually bypass in favor of my phone’s, there’s nothing to “brick.” But it’s bizarre that a six-year-old car can’t run the manufacturer’s software.
Less crucially, purchases like smart TVs can quickly become outdated, if not worse. Apps that the customer bought the device expecting to run—they’re pictured right there on the box!—can become unsupported almost immediately. Several major manufacturers relied on Yahoo Smart TV to support various apps; they stopped working last month for older models.
