When internet goes offline, everyone gets online to joke about it

Global AWS crash sends users scrambling to social media with memes, quips, and digital doomsday humour

A massive outage affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20, brought much of the internet to a standstill - and, in true online fashion, sparked a wave of memes and jokes across social media.

The disruption, which hit AWS's US-EAST-1 region, caused widespread downtime for platforms including Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Venmo, and Slack. Users flooded X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit to report the outage, with "AWS down" quickly trending worldwide.

While businesses scrambled to manage the fallout, netizens did what they do best - turn chaos into comedy. Social media feeds were soon filled with memes comparing the outage to a "digital apocalypse," with users poking fun at how the internet seemed to collapse in unison.

Many joked about productivity grinding to a halt, while others humorously depicted engineers frantically trying to "restart the cloud." Some memes referenced the irony of how one company's glitch could silence so much of the modern web.

The outage also reignited conversations about the internet's dependence on a few major cloud providers. However, for most users, humour served as the best coping mechanism. Memes highlighting people "touching grass" or rediscovering offline life quickly went viral, showing the internet's collective ability to laugh through inconvenience.

As AWS began restoring services, the jokes only grew sharper - with users joking that "the engineers deserve a national holiday" once the web was back up. The meme storm became a shared online moment, reminding everyone how digital frustration often fuels creativity.

From light-hearted one-liners to elaborate visuals, the internet once again proved that no outage is too big to escape its sense of humour - especially when the cloud itself crashes.