How a typo took down S3, the backbone of the internet:

Earlier this week, much of the internet ground to a halt when the servers that power them suddenly vanished. The servers were part of S3, Amazon’s popular web hosting service, and when they went down they took several big services with them. Quora, Trello, and IFTTT were among the sites affected by the disruption. The servers came back online more than four hours later, but not before totally ruining the UK celebration of AWSome Day.

Now we know how it happened. In a note posted to customers today, Amazon revealed the cause of the problem: a typo.

On Tuesday morning, members of the S3 team were debugging the billing system. As part of that, the team needed to take a small number of servers offline. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended,” Amazon said. “The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.”

It sounds like a typical Michael Bolton Error to me.

It’s so great we a decentralized network of servers that keeps the Internet up and running all the time.

You know like one of the original goals of ARPANET.

Well, this sucks.

I joined Weave a few months ago as a way to meet more people and grow my professional network. It’s important to meet people face-to-face and not just text like 13-year-olds.

Hey humans! It’s important to be human.

So i’ve been on a total of 2 coffee dates and then I get this in my inbox earlier today:

It seems I was too tremendous for Weave and I broke the system.

It’s too bad, I think Weave was a great service and I was way closer to upgrading to a premium account than I was for LinkedIn (especially now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn).