Internet and Internet Things: The loss of institutional memory and worker experience caused by the layoffs at Amazon Web Services related to AI indicate that this may not be the last major internet outage coming from AWS. AWS has emerged as being critical to the financial sector, leading to calls for it to fall under financial sector regulations. Discussions are popping up regarding decentralizing any service that touches money, safety or civic life of large numbers of people by only a handful of servers. The same issue was faced here in Canada 4-5 years ago when Rogers’ servers went down, affecting a host of internet services involving private and public sectors. And back then, the discussion went to the subject of too many internet services in too few hands.
AWS is responsible for 30% of market share of cloud infrastructure, while Microsoft’s Azure comes in at 20%, Google Cloud at 13%, with the rest mostly in the hands of Alibaba, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, and Tencent, according to data from Synergy Research Group. For the first time last year, only 49%, or just less than half, of internet traffic was generated by humans. The rest was generated by IOT devices, telemetry software, and other forms of automation from software bots.
Internet Intelligence Iatrogenically Influences IOT. The layoff of some hundreds of programmers working for Amazon Web Services (AWS), to be replaced by AI bots led to a meltdown on October 20, of their wide range of online services leading to some hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity across several industries. These include factories, airports, retail chains, Amazon’s main retail site, social media sites, video providers, gaming platforms, banks, government services, “smart homes”, and “smart devices”, all spanning the entire globe.
Burning Bed by Bezos’ Bungling Burdens Bedtimers. Buyers who paid $2000 for a “smart” mattress were in for a rude shock when they found their beds stuck at high temperatures and in odd positions during the night as the AWS failure went on in the wee hours of October 20. The mattress, made by a company called “Eight Sleep”, relied on Amazon AWS web services for its operation, and like most IOT devices, does not have an “offline” mode in case the devices lose their internet connection.