Everything is in “the cloud” now, except the cloud is a real place, and it’s in Northern Virginia. Rows and rows of servers stacked in Amazon-owned warehouses across Ashburn, Haymarket, McNair, Manassas, and Sterling make up a chunk of the infrastructure for the modern internet—equipment as crucial as railway tracks and the electric grid. When a technical issue disrupted operations at those facilities yesterday, it was enough to temporarily crash the internet for users around the world.

现在一切都在“云端”，但“云”其实是一个真实存在的地方，它就位于弗吉尼亚州北部。亚马逊在阿什本、黑马基特、麦克奈尔、马纳萨斯和斯特灵等地拥有的仓库中，堆放着一排排服务器，它们构成了现代互联网基础设施的重要部分——这些设备的重要性堪比铁路轨道和电网。昨天，当这些设施出现技术问题导致运营中断时，就足以造成全球用户暂时性地无法访问互联网。

The incident marked at least the third time in the past five years that Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia facilities contributed to a widespread internet outage. This time, more than 1,000 sites and services were affected, according to Downdetector, costing companies an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars. Venmo users were locked out of their payments, and international banks experienced major blips in their service. People struggled to book urgent doctor appointments and couldn’t access their Medicare benefits. Snapchat and Reddit were down, as were Instagram and Hulu. Ring paused their doorbell cameras; ChatGPT stopped answering. (Some unfortunate customers of Eight Sleep, which sells AI-powered, temperature-changing mattresses, woke to bright strobe lights or an “absolutely freezing” bed, per testimony on X.) Throughout most of yesterday, the connective tissue of modern life seemed to be under threat—a reminder that the internet is physical, fallible, and heavily reliant on just a few massive companies.

此次事件标志着在过去五年里，亚马逊网络服务（AWS）位于北弗吉尼亚州的设施至少第三次导致了大规模的互联网中断。此次事故影响了超过1000个网站和服务，根据实时追踪网站和在线服务中断情况的Downdetector平台的数据，这给公司造成了估计高达数千亿美元的损失。移动支付应用Venmo的用户无法进行支付，国际银行的服务也出现了严重故障。人们难以预约紧急医生看诊，也无法查询他们的医疗保险福利。社交媒体Snapchat和Reddit无法访问，Instagram和Hulu（流媒体服务）也一样。智能家居品牌Ring暂停了门铃摄像头服务；人工智能聊天机器人ChatGPT也停止了响应。（根据社交平台X上的用户反馈，一些购买了Eight Sleep公司——这家销售人工智能温控床垫的公司——产品的倒霉用户，醒来时发现床垫发出刺眼的频闪灯光，或者感觉床“冷得彻骨”。）昨天的大部分时间里，现代生活的“连接纽带”（即互联网）似乎都受到了威胁——这再次提醒我们，互联网是实体存在的、容易出错的，而且严重依赖于少数几家大型公司。

The modern web owes that fragility in part to the cloud. In the pre-cloud age, setting up a website meant buying physical servers, procuring software licenses, and writing foundational code from scratch. This DIY process was both extremely expensive and time-consuming. The basic proposition of the cloud is What if you didn’t have to do any of that? Amazon and its competitors own the servers and prewrite the code so customers don’t have to. When developers lease infrastructure from cloud providers, they get to leave the cumbersome work of maintenance to someone else.

现代网络的这份脆弱性，部分归因于云计算。在云计算时代之前，搭建一个网站意味着需要购买实体服务器、获取软件许可证，并从零开始编写基础代码。这种自主搭建的过程既极其昂贵又非常耗时。而云计算的核心主张是：如果你根本不用做这些呢？亚马逊及其竞争对手拥有服务器并预先编写好代码，这样客户就无需亲自动手了。当开发者从云服务提供商那里租用基础设施时，他们就可以将繁琐的维护工作交给其他人来处理。

The trade-off is ownership for accessibility, up-front costs for monthly fees—and it has proved extremely attractive. Adoption in the corporate world has been nearly universal. Amazon spearheaded the rush to the cloud in the late 2000s, when it began building the warehouses that now house much of the modern internet. Thanks to that first-mover advantage, it still dominates today: Amazon controls an estimated 30 percent of the global market for cloud computing, while its competitors Microsoft and Google have captured 20 and 13 percent, respectively. Because the actual servers are consolidated under a handful of companies, so are the potential points of failure—not to mention the profits.

这种取舍——用所有权换取便捷性，用一次性前期投入换取月度费用——已被证明极具吸引力。在企业界，这种模式的应用几乎普及。亚马逊在2000年代末率先引领了云计算热潮，当时它开始建造如今承载着大部分现代互联网基础设施的仓库。得益于这种先发优势，亚马逊至今仍占据主导地位：据估计，它控制着全球云计算市场30%的份额，而其竞争对手微软和谷歌则分别占据了20%和13%。由于实际的服务器都集中在少数几家公司手中，潜在的故障点也随之集中，更不用说巨大的利润了。

Unlike the highways that crisscross the United States, which are built and maintained by government programs, physical data conduits are built and maintained by corporations. The internet is often understood as a free and open resource, but it is controlled by a small group of digital landowners. Last July, a single cybersecurity firm caused an internet-wide meltdown that grounded planes and interrupted financial services around the world. Jonathan Kanter, a former top antitrust regulator in the Biden administration, told me such disruptions help “society understand the magnitude of the power, the magnitude of the reach” that certain companies have. “It doesn’t just affect one commercial interest—it affects the entire country.”

与纵横交错于美国各地、由政府项目建设和维护的高速公路不同，物理数据管道则由公司建设和维护。互联网常被理解为一种自由开放的资源，但它实际上却被一小部分“数字化地主”所控制。去年七月，一家网络安全公司引发了全球范围内的互联网瘫痪，导致飞机停飞，并中断了世界各地的金融服务。乔纳森·坎特（Jonathan Kanter），拜登政府的前联邦反垄断高级监管官员，告诉我，此类中断事件有助于“社会理解某些公司所拥有的权力的巨大程度，以及影响力的广度”。他补充说：“这不仅仅影响某个商业利益——它影响的是整个国家。”

Amazon’s dominance is compounded by the nested structure of the internet: One hyperlink leads to another, which leads to another, which at some point probably leads back to Amazon. An issue with Amazon’s Virginia servers might affect Amazon products globally and any websites that interact with Amazon-backed services; a business that doesn’t rely on Amazon for its services might still be entwined with another business that does.

亚马逊的主导地位因互联网的嵌套结构而进一步巩固：一个超链接指向另一个，再指向另一个，最终很可能又回到了亚马逊。亚马逊位于弗吉尼亚州的服务器一旦出现问题，可能会影响其全球产品以及所有与亚马逊支持的服务进行交互的网站；一家即使不依赖亚马逊提供服务的企业，也可能与另一家依赖亚马逊的企业紧密相连。

There are ways out of the centralization trap, but they come with their own problems. Rumble, the streaming service that has become a home for those deplatformed elsewhere, has an AWS alternative of its own. The issue is that Rumble is also linked to inflammatory right-wing causes that could potentially pose reputational risk for major companies looking to use its cloud services. Urbit, another attempt at decentralizing the internet that has generated buzz over the past few years, was founded by the software developer and far-right provocateur Curtis Yarvin, who has openly advocated for an American monarchy. No truly decentralized alternative has so far come close to the scale of AWS, which has dramatically outspent and outperformed its competition. And at this point, new challengers may find it too hard to catch up.

摆脱中心化陷阱的方法是有的，但它们也伴随着自身的问题。例如，流媒体服务Rumble成为了那些在其他平台被“封杀”的人的聚集地，它也拥有自己的AWS（亚马逊云服务）替代方案。问题在于，Rumble也与一些煽动性的右翼事业有关联，这可能会给那些寻求使用其云服务的大公司带来声誉风险。另一个旨在去中心化互联网并近几年引起关注的尝试是Urbit，它由软件开发人员兼极右翼煽动者柯蒂斯·亚文（Curtis Yarvin）创立，此人曾公开鼓吹美国君主制。迄今为止，还没有任何真正去中心化的替代方案能达到AWS的规模，AWS在投入和表现上都远远超过了其竞争对手。而且，在目前这个阶段，新的挑战者可能会发现很难赶上。

True decentralization is also incredibly difficult to achieve, in cloud computing and beyond. Consider crypto, a form of digital currency originally designed to deliver freedom from the centralized authority of banks and governments. That was the idea, anyway—in practice, this roughly $4 trillion industry is very much beholden to the centralized internet, as well as to Wall Street and Congress. Coinbase, which also went down yesterday amid the AWS outage, is in some ways the antithesis of what crypto’s libertarian thought leaders imagined: Like many other crypto companies, it discovered that centralization is the price of doing business.

真正的去中心化在云计算乃至其他领域都极难实现。以加密货币为例，它是一种数字货币，最初设计目的是为了摆脱银行和政府的中心化权威控制。然而这只是最初的设想——在实践中，这个估值约4万亿美元的产业，在很大程度上受制于中心化的互联网，同时也被华尔街和国会所左右。Coinbase（美国最大的加密货币交易平台之一），在昨天的AWS中断期间也瘫痪了，在某些方面，它与加密货币自由主义思想领袖所设想的完全相反：像许多其他加密货币公司一样，它发现中心化是开展业务的必要条件。

Amazon doesn’t publicize the existence of its Virginia data centers, and most customers may not even know they exist. But as the steward of the internet, the company has accrued an enormous amount of influence over our lives: how we access our money, how we seek medical help, even how some people get a good night’s sleep. Tech outages happen—but under our current system, a bad day for Amazon can be a bad day for everyone.

亚马逊并未公开宣传其在弗吉尼亚州的数据中心，大多数客户甚至可能都不知道它们的存在。然而，作为互联网的“管理者”，亚马逊公司对我们的生活积累了巨大的影响力：这体现在我们如何存取金钱、如何寻求医疗帮助，甚至是一些人如何获得优质睡眠等方方面面。技术故障时有发生，但在我们当前的系统下，亚马逊“不顺”的一天可能就是所有人都“不顺”的一天。