Where the Internet Goes When It’s Down

Today, we have a midweek blog post from Trent Wintermeier on a timely event

Trent Wintermeier is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are in digital rhetoric, community literacy, and sound studies. His work on how local communities sense the impact of digital systems has been featured in journals such as Heliotrope and podcasts like The Data Fix.

Wi-Fi stutters. Screens freeze. Connectivity fails. “The internet must be down,” I thought to myself on Monday morning as my students pulled up Canvas on their laptops and tablets to find a message that the learning management system was “experiencing issues due to an ongoing Amazon Web Services incident.” But when the internet is down, where does it really go?

The nationwide incident happened because Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-based web-hosting provider, experienced an outage that impacted platforms like Signal, Reddit, and indeed, Canvas—all of which rely on cloud computing. Canvas, for example, depends on AWS to store data and generate the terawatts of computing power that allows students in our courses to access assignments, send us emails, and write discussion posts. The cloud affords platforms the ability to store, process, and deliver this information instantly and easily. 

When the internet is “up” and running, what we really mean is that the cloud is functioning as expected. AWS servers are running, fans are spinning, data is moving. The cloud makes computing feel seamless in this way, as its material infrastructure remains amorphous, hidden, atmospheric. As rhetoric scholar Dustin Edwards explains, cloud computing is framed as an ethereal entity, making it seem detached from the material reality of our digital world. 

The AWS outage on Monday was caused by a mundane DNS error, an everyday process of our computing infrastructure that simply directs internet traffic. As my students tried to access Canvas, AWS couldn’t point them in the right direction. This outage is a reminder that it’s only when cloud computing fails that the internet comes crashing, plummeting, spiraling back “down” to the material world of data centers, colorful wires, cooling fans, and other tangible components of our digital infrastructure. 

We get the impression that the  internet is “down” when the web-hosting fantasies of companies that own a third of the internet falter—when their systems start to crack and break. It’s all too familiar: the 404 messages and operational updates that read “we’re sorry for the inconvenience” or “we’re working on recovering as soon as possible.” What this usually means is that such cloud computing companies like AWS have an issue at one of their many data centers, such as the one in Virginia that went awry. 

Today,  the impact of these systems is clear—especially in terms of the environmental injury imposed by these data centers. Mel Hogan argued nearly a decade ago that the water consumption of these facilities is nothing less than an environmental disaster. AWS relies on these types of facilities to construct the “cloud,” a seamless experience of the internet that makes our digital world feel like a single, up-and-running entity. Centralization furthers this damage, and this damage is impressed upon us through the glitches, malfunctions, and bugs of a system failure. 

Web-hosting companies like AWS—but also Google and Microsoft—own most of the internet and the platforms we engage with in our classrooms. So when they crash and burn, it gives us users the impression that the internet is “down.” Our digital world enacts its true fragility only when we are reminded of its material presence: the zeros and ones processed by water-sucking, community-polluting cloud infrastructure. The more centralized and consolidated the internet becomes, the more likely it is to be, or at least feel or seem, “down.”

The cheap and pollutant cloud computing services that AWS offers will only continue to require more power, more water, more people, more footprints as an increasing amount of companies use this resource. For platforms like Canvas, the everyday user—instructors and students—are implicated in this system. The impression that the internet is “down” opens up moments for rhetorical action: to reconsider our dependency on platforms that require environmental injury, to create learning experiences beyond the centralization of our digital landscape. 

When the internet goes “down,” it drops straight out of the sky. Indeed, as Susan Leigh Star revealed years ago, infrastructure “becomes visible upon breakdown.” We’re reminded in these moments that our digital systems are a tangled collection of wires, an endless amount of servers with twinkly lights that signal our platforms’ material state. “Down” is not figurative—it’s a literal direction, a movement straight back into dirt and water. When the internet is down, the little Canvas spaceship plummets back to earth—no robot with a wrench or extra wing can save it. 

With every glitch and flutter, the internet goes “down,” deeper into the ground and back to its environmental and centralized reality. Next time the cloud takes a nosedive, we should pay attention and respond to where it lands.