As I type these words lots and lots of websites are experiencing all kinds of problems and difficulties. This is simply due to a problem at Amazon S3 cluster.

Skype has crashed and stopped responding, Twitter, Tumblr and other major websites are barely working, most aren’t displaying images, widgets or static material that was outsourced to Amazon S3 services.

It’s kinda funny how this goes against the very nature of the web, in each networks are interconnected in several ways to ensure that a major breakdown won’t happen.

One of the first lessons you’ll learn on most basic business management courses or books is that centralization is a bad thing, specially when the tasks being centralized are business critical.

But that goes against human nature. Humans tend to like stuff piled up and organized in large containers, that’s why IKEA furniture is such a success. Even tetris was such a smashing hit due to this very basic need in every person to organize stuff that is scattered around.

Amazon S3 services exist just for that, to accommodate huge amounts of data in a big, out of sight container that it’s easy to manage and cheap. But when that container is locked, and our stuff is locked inside things don’t look so bright anymore.

At this point there’s no explanation to what or why this is happening, but the tech web is bubbling about it’s new found dependency on Amazon and it’s dangers.

At this time the only bit of news from Amazon is that they are aware of the problem and are investigating the issue.