By Joah Boland-Landa ’27
It’s well known that wolves howl to stay connected, but last week our Wolfnet went silent, leaving our pack disconnected and discombobulated. Last Monday, AWS (Amazon Web Services), a large-scale IT and cloud-computing company known for maintaining cloud storage for various online corporations experienced an “operational issue” at 12:11am that affected 14 separate services in its U.S.-East-1 Region center in northern Virginia. This outage affected many popular websites/online platforms such as Reddit, Github, Ring (the doorbell company), Venomo, Canva, Zoom, and Slack. The outage also hit close to home, impacting internet service providers across Canada. This outage really highlights how dependent we are on one storage provider, with so much digital infrastructure crashing and an estimated 75 million dollars of lost productivity. That same day, our own information system, Wolfnet, experienced numerous delays and disruptions. Was this coincidence or correlation?
Here at WPGA, several students undoubtedly were impacted by the outage, as breaktime favourites such as Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, and Clash of Clans experienced a rolling number of issues, from frozen game play to services crashing completely. But more than that, the learning information system that powers Wolfnet, Blackbaud, was also impacted. According to company vice president, Mark Davis, “Several Blackbaud solutions were impacted by the global outage with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that occurred between 2:49 a.m.-6:01 p.m. ET on October 20, 2025.” Davis went on to say “We regret the frustration and inconvenience this outage caused. While global outages from major service providers like Amazon Web Services can present significant challenges, we remain committed to finding effective ways to support our solutions and maintain reliability however possible.”
So, what does that mean for our community at WPGA?
First, it highlights that we are part of an interconnected world. The westside of Vancouver may be 10,000kms away from the AWS servers, but the ripple effects are felt here. We are all closer than we might think. These corporations sometimes feel so far removed from us, when in fact we all rely on the same services and cloud storage companies. It was sort of comforting that on that Monday morning, from the biggest CEOs to simple high school students were desperately calling their IT departments to try and figure out what was going on. It was strangely unifying, in a way. In a world that can often feel separated and divided, one company’s mistake had a sort of way of uniting us all.
This all speaks to an idea of digital resilience. In the future, we will have to figure out ways to adapt to such problems. Even though this issue might be seen as comforting in some ways, it’s also scary. The fact that so much modern infrastructure is reliant on one company is a worrying thing, and if it had been anything more than a simple shutdown so much more of the internet and real people could have suffered. Having so much of our daily lives dominated by just a few companies can “create a brittleness in our economy and a lack of resiliency,” said Robin Shaban, co-founder and chair of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project. Efforts should be made to decentralize cloud computing and storage, as it shouldn’t be solely on one company to run most of anything. Not only to lighten the load on said company, but to ensure that they don’t have absolute control over everyone and everything. In short, it’s in an effort to stop a monopoly. While Amazon has always maintained they follow the law and are not a monopoly, CBC reports that they “agreed to settle the case with a landmark $2.5-billion US deal this year” regarding anti-trust and anti-monopoly lawsuits.
The lesson learned is to expect the unexpected when it comes to cloud-based services. It was very abrupt to most of us, and not something most of us expected. It is a reminder that even the largest, most complex systems are not immune to failure, and it is crucial for businesses to build resilience and redundancy into their own systems, rather than relying on a single cloud provider. For the future, efforts should be made to strengthen cloud storage, and spread data management to other cloud computing companies. The situation really highlighted how reliant we are on our technologies. Perhaps the most radical response is to seek out more opportunities to do things more in person, with real life connections. Technology is only as reliable as the people behind it, so if there is ever a world where we cannot rely or trust the people providing our technology, we will have to learn how to connect in person once again.