Workers are claiming that they were left dealing with a major outage after Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down.
This caused massive disruptions across multiple platforms including food delivery, streaming, financial services, gaming and social media.
Now, one employee has claimed that this was caused by a ‘kill switch’ which was allegedly tested by the company.
Known online as @blah.violet, the worker took to TikTok to say: “They don’t have any information for us.... I believe in the kill switch. They are just trying to test it out, and it works.”
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In the background, another member of staff could be heard saying: “They’re cleansing it right now, from everything.”
Many viewers took to the TikTok comment section to react to the video, with one user writing: “My daughter’s online school uses AWS!!! We’re supposed to be in class right now and we are also just sitting here. This is weird lol.”
Another said: “Is this why my alarm wouldn’t stop even though I kept yelling ‘ALEXA STOP’?”
A third person commented: “While it’s down, now is the time to start talking amongst yourselves about unionizing.”
And a fourth user added: “Almost like centralizing most of the web under one company is a bad idea for resilience.”
Despite conspiracy theories around a possible ‘kill switch’, the e-commerce giant has spoken out, citing an ‘operational issue’ related to issues with its domain name system which has impacted several services, with Amazon adding that it was ‘working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery’.
Other services were also affected including Ring doorbell cameras, smart speakers that are powered by Alexa and Kindle readers.
This outage also affected students who were unable to submit their work after Canvas was taken offline temporarily, which is a popular educational platform.
In a report by the Daily Mail, Damien P Williams, a professor of philosophy and data science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said: “I currently can’t grade any online assignments, and my students can’t access their online materials.”
Meanwhile over at the Ohio State University, its 70,000 students at all six campuses were informed via email on Monday morning that online course materials might not be accessible due to the outage and instead ‘students should connect with their instructors for any alternative plans’.