about that aws outage thing

On 20-Oct-2025, there was a boo-boo over at AWS (Amazon Web Services), and because roughly about a third of the internet runs off that, when AWS has a problem, the internet as a whole has a problem. Amazon has since fixed the problem. But a lot of people realized how much of the internet relies on AWS to actually be up and running for things to work.

No, it was not a security breach thing. A lot of people think it was. Nope. It was a straight up IT thing. DNS resolution, specifically. That's the thing that translates names into internet addresses. In very oversimplified terms, that means that when you type a whatever-dot-com in your browser, DNS translates that into the numerical address (i.e. IP address) of the server serving the web site, finds it, then the site is served to your browser. It was the DNS as far as I know that temporarily broke on Amazon's end.

Did this outage affect me?

Yes, but only in a minor way.

At the time of the outage, I needed to use part of the US Postal web site to check and see if a package had been shipped, and that didn't work. There were also a few web sites I normally use that took a really long time to load, but eventually did.

Briefly, I actually thought the connectivity problems stemmed from my internet connection, or maybe something screwy going on with my browser or whatever. Nope. It was AWS.

This outage reminded me of why I do things in certain ways concerning my own digital life.

One of these ways is, of course, how I do navigation.

Because I use a Garmin DriveSmart 76, no internet is used when I navigate since all the map data is hosted locally to the unit.

I've personally never been screwed over using a Garmin, but from the user reviews I've read over the years, a ton of people routinely get screwed over using smartphone navigation.

The worst concerning smartphone navigation cloud crap is when the entire "timeline" gets wiped. You login to the app one day, and every location you saved along with every location you've been to is gone, and there's no way to get it back. It's gone forever.

For any location I save, that's stored on my Garmin navigator, but I take it one step further. If it's a location I deem important, I get the GPS coordinates for it and save that separately.

Small example: 41.46809, -71.30303. Those coordinates point to a tree on Wetmore Ave in Newport Rhode Island. Anything special there? No. It's just a place to park that's within walking distance of the Cliff Walk on Belmont Beach. I like that place. Quite nice to visit.

If I were using some crappy smartphone nav app, "pinned" that location, but then my "timeline" was wiped out due to a system glitch, now it's gone. I would have to remember the location was in Rhode Island and remember Wetmore Ave if I had any hope of ever getting back there again.

Have I ever had to refer back to an old CSV, GPX or even a plain text file with coordinates to find a location of the past? Yes, and more than once. Addresses change, street names change, businesses sometimes up and vanish like a fart in the wind, whatever. GPS coordinates is sometimes the only way to find locations. And the last thing I need is some stupid nav app wiping out previously saved locations because of an "update".

Again, the DriveSmart 76 saves locations locally and doesn't need internet to work, which is good. Satellites in space is how it knows where it is. And the nice part is that there's even a backup for that. If GPS fails temporarily, the DS76 uses two fallback satellite networks, Galileo and BeiDou. Very nice.

Published 2025 Oct 21