Bernard O'Shea: 5 things I learned from the Amazon outage

Screengrab of the website for Playstation. Disruption affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) has led to a spike in reported outages across a wide variety of internet services including for HMRC, Zoom and Snapchat. Issue date: Monday October 20, 2025. PA Photo. Photo credit should read: Playstation/PA Wire

Last week, Amazon Web Services — the big invisible engine that most of us don’t know we use — briefly went down. 

For a few hours, the world had a tiny “Oh Jesus” moment, and in that soul-searching wobble, we all discovered just how many ordinary parts of our lives were secretly held together by an unremarkable digital server in the middle of an industrial estate.

1. We don’t live in our homes anymore — we live through the cloud

The strangest part of the Amazon Web Services outage wasn’t that technology failed — it was the personality change that swept through Irish households the second the digital walls went dark.

People talk about a “smart home” as if it’s a luxury. It’s not. It’s a co-dependency arrangement. 

The lights don’t come on because I flick a switch, they come on because a server farm in Midwest America has decided I deserve illumination.

When our Ring doorbell froze, there was a split second where I genuinely wondered if the outside world still existed. No motion alert. No recording. Just … silence. 

You don’t realise how spiritually tethered to the doorbell you’ve become until it stops blinking and you feel like you’ve lost a member of staff.

2. The kids handled it the way modern children handle all crises ...

By repeatedly shouting “Alexa!” as if louder yelling somehow boosts the signal.

Nothing. No music. No weather updates. No smug AI voice. You would think the electricity had gone, or civilisation had collapsed.

But no, it was only the one thing that actually holds their brains together.

What stunned me most wasn’t the outage — it was the sudden domestic quiet.

Not reflection. Not peace. Just disorientation. 

The modern family’s emotional thermostat is apparently calibrated through Amazon Web Services, and when it goes offline, we’re all just feral mammals in a carpeted cave, wondering where our personality went.

3. The outage revealed how absurdly centralised modern life has become

If your doorbell going mute is unsettling, wait until you see what happens when AWS sneezes at an industrial scale.

Because that half-day blip exposed something bigger than a smart speaker tantrum — it exposed how much of global civilisation is now a single point of failure held together by faith, fibre cables, and air-conditioned cyber warehouses.

McDonald’s tills died worldwide. You could see the existential shock on people’s faces. 

Humanity used to fear famine. Now we fear the inability to process a McFlurry.

Then airlines started wheezing — check-in systems backed up, boarding passes stalled, entire departure halls full of passengers realising for the first time in decades that a plane doesn’t fly because of engines — it flies because a server farm has given spiritual permission for that plane to exist.

4. We no longer shop — we transact by prayer

The banking systems didn’t fully collapse — but they flickered. And when a tap terminal flickers, society spiritually buckles.

 We have become a people ruled not by money, but by the approval beep. The beep is identity.

The beep is dignity. The beep is a communion wafer.

The outage created a moment where shopping stopped being a transaction and started feeling like an intercession. Shopkeepers looked traumatised. 

There is nothing more unthinkable in modern retail than the phrase, “Would you … eh … have cash?” It feels medieval. Like they’re asking if you can thresh your own wheat.

Small Irish shops were oddly heroic. They tried. They eyeballed totals. They trusted. They improvised. The local corner shop remembered humanity.

But the big chains? Dead. No till = no thought. No beep = existential outage. 

A multinational corporation, hundreds of thousands of staff, global supply chains, robotics, fleet delivery — defeated by the absence of a single approving ping.

This is what the outage revealed so cleanly: Our payments are not transactions. They are tiny digital pilgrimages. 

The card tap leaves your hand Æ flies to a server Æ asks a trillion-dollar deity for a blessing Æ returns with its ruling.

Approved = civilisation. Declined = medieval.

5. The real story wasn’t tech — it was how instantly we discovered we have no offline self

Every era has blind spots. Ours is the thought that we still possess traditional resilience in reserve — that, underneath all this digital comfort, there is still the “old us” waiting patiently, like a pilot light.

But what the outage quietly showed is that the pilot light isn’t gone; it’s just very faint. We haven’t lost competence, we’ve externalised it. We haven’t become helpless, we’ve become cloud-shaped.

We don’t plan around failure anymore because modern life has trained us to expect seamlessness as the default state. 

So when there is even a whisper of disruption, we don’t fall back on Plan B; we pause until Plan A returns. And the most humbling realisation is… we’re comfortable with that.

Because this was not a crisis, not a catastrophe, not even a proper outage, it was a blink.

The outage didn’t expose a flaw in technology so much as a truth about us: We like living this way.

We just didn’t realise how thoroughly we’d moved in with the cloud until it briefly went out.