Happy Halloween, you magnificent minions of the digital realm! Gather ’round, if your smart devices are still, you know, smart, because we have a truly terrifying tale for you. Forget ghosts, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night. This year, the real horror is far more insidious. It’s the horror of… nothing. The profound, soul-crushing void that appears when the Cloud finally decides to take a sick day. A very, very sick day.

Imagine, if you will, a world where your Ring doorbell becomes a mere decorative circle of plastic, silently mocking your inability to answer a knock from an actual, flesh-and-blood human. A world where your carefully curated Netflix queue vanishes into the ether, replaced by a static screen that vaguely resembles a forgotten relic from the 1990s. And the ultimate terror? No “next-day delivery” from Amazon. Ever again. (Though, let’s be honest, that last one has been a dystopian reality for about a year now, hasn’t it? Perhaps the Cloud was just practicing.)

It all began, as these things often do, with a whisper. A glitch. A tiny, almost imperceptible hiccup in the digital fabric that weaves our lives together. A hiccup emanating from a place so mundane, so utterly un-Halloween-y, it’s almost funny: US-EAST-1 in northern Virginia. Yes, folks, the epicentre of our digital apocalypse was, according to the official communiques, a “load balancer health issue” linked to a “DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint.” Sounds like something a particularly disgruntled goblin might mumble, doesn’t it?

But what it actually meant was chaos. Utter, unadulterated digital pandemonium. For a glorious, horrifying moment, it was like the universe decided to channel its inner Douglas Adams, pulling the plug on the Infinite Improbability Drive just as we were all about to order another novelty tea towel online.

First, the streaming services sputtered and died. Prime Video, Disney+, a thousand other digital pacifiers for the masses – all gone. Families across the land were forced to talk to each other. The horror! Children, accustomed to endless Paw Patrol, stared blankly at their parents, wondering if this was some elaborate, cruel trick. And as for my Amazon parcel, the one I ordered three weeks ago with the promise of “next-day delivery”? It probably evaporated into a puff of ones and zeroes somewhere over the Atlantic, tragically unfulfilled, a spectral package forever haunting the digital highways.

Then came the banking woes. Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland – all decided to take an unscheduled siesta. Imagine trying to pay for your last-minute Halloween candy with a ghost of a transaction. The cashiers, confused and disoriented, probably started accepting shiny pebbles as currency. The economy, dear readers, began to resemble a particularly bad game of Monopoly where no one remembered the rules.

But the truly unsettling part? The Ring doorbells. Oh, the Ring doorbells! A minor inconvenience, you might think. But consider the psychological impact. We’ve outsourced our very sense of security to the Cloud. Our ability to see who’s lurking on our porch (probably just the postman, if he ever gets here again). Without it, are we truly safe? Or are we just a collection of confused, doorbell-less automatons, yearning for the reassuring chime that now only exists in our memories?

It turns out, all those services, all those apps, all those precious cat videos – they were riding on a handful of digital shoulders. And when those shoulders slumped, everything, and I mean everything, went splat.

The good news? Amazon, in a moment of true heroic effort, announced that the system was returning to “pre-event levels.” They even said the data backlog would be cleared in two hours! (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. Much like my “next-day” parcel, it’s still probably languishing in some digital purgatory).

Now, some pesky MPs, those tireless guardians of our collective sanity, are asking some rather pointed questions. Why isn’t Amazon Web Services a “Critical Third Party” (CTP) under the new rules? Why are we entrusting our entire digital infrastructure to a company that can’t even get a parcel to me on time, let alone keep my doorbell functioning? Are we truly comfortable with key parts of our IT infrastructure being hosted in a land far, far away, where a “load balancer health issue” can bring us to our knees?

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/49836/documents/267185/default/

These are indeed grave questions, my friends. Because on this Halloween night, as the shadows lengthen and the wind howls, let us remember the true horror: the day the Cloud burst. The day our digital lives, our convenience, our very ability to complain about late parcels online, evaporated into a terrifying abyss. So, hug your non-cloud-dependent pets, tell your loved ones you care, and for the love of all that is spooky, check if your actual, physical doorbell still works.

And if it doesn’t? Well, then we’re truly in for a trick, not a treat.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to carve a pumpkin that looks suspiciously like a malfunctioning AWS server. Happy haunting!