‘my internet bed is broken’ is just the start
kill switch
Kaleidoscope
4.7 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A few weeks ago on Monday, October 20, a major outage in Amazon Web Services took down a bunch of the Internet. How did an error in one data center in Virginia affect everything from Snapchat and Reddit to ‘smartbeds’ to government services? Dexter talks to Dr. Corinne Cath, a cultural anthropologist and technology researcher, about how the “cloud,” and therefore the Internet, became mostly controlled by 3 big tech companies – Amazon, Microsoft, and Google – why that puts our democracy at risk, and what we can do to change it.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read + Watch:
Corinne’s op-ed: https://www.techpolicy.press/amazon-cloud-outage-reveals-democratic-deficit-in-relying-on-big-tech/
Our episode on AI and the environment: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kill-switch/id1449757372?i=1000711126940
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:14.4 | We have breaking news for you this morning. |
| 0:17.5 | A widespread internet outage has caused major disruptions for some of the biggest |
| 0:22.2 | web services in the world. |
| 0:23.3 | There's a good chance today that some website app or service that you tried to use today |
| 0:27.6 | was down. That's following an outage from Amazon Web Services. |
| 0:30.6 | Amazon Web Services, the backbone of the internet, suffered a major outage that took hundreds |
| 0:35.8 | of services offline across the globe. |
| 0:38.9 | Monday morning, October 20th, Americans woke up to news of a massive internet outage, and it |
| 0:44.6 | wasn't just America. |
| 0:46.1 | I think one of the things to really note about this outage is that it was one of the |
| 0:51.7 | biggest in recent history. In my decade in the field, this definitely ranks in the top five. |
| 1:00.4 | Dr. Corinne Caff is a culture anthropologist, and she works at the Human Rights Organization Article 19. |
| 1:05.8 | She researches internet infrastructure, AI, cloud computing, and basically how technology affects our day-to-day lives. |
| 1:13.0 | I have asked some of my colleagues, like veterans of the field who've been in the industry |
| 1:17.6 | since the internet was born, and they pretty much said the same thing. Like, this was huge. |
| 1:24.5 | A lot of people didn't necessarily know that there was some global internet outage going on. |
| 1:28.3 | They just knew that there was some website or service that they used that wasn't working, |
| 1:32.3 | like their favorite messaging app, or even their smart bed. |
| 1:36.3 | Some of these are kind of benign or even funny. |
| 1:40.3 | Like there were some excellent threads on the internet about people who had internet-connected |
| 1:46.1 | mattresses. Oh, the beds. Yes. Yes, the beds. Oh, my God. A-pods. Shout out to A-pods and everyone |
... |
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