this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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My schools entire assignment system is out today.

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[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Same.

I think my school might have had a local mirror of their d2l brightspace instance though because it miraculously was still up, but taking multiple minutes to load pages

[–] Furbag@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A lot of my services were unaffected 🤷‍♂️

[–] Triumph@fedia.io 200 points 3 days ago (10 children)

You'd be hard pressed to find an online service that isn't associated with AWS in some way.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 114 points 3 days ago (10 children)

Sadly, there are some who don't even know it, because they're buying services from someone else that buys them from someone else that buys them from Amazon. So they're currently wondering what the fuck is even going on, since they thought they weren't using AWS.

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[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 22 points 3 days ago (8 children)

I'm pretty sure most of Azure (Microsoft), OCI (Oracle), and GCP (Google) have all been fine.

Bezos is a craven beast but I don't see many companies above with CEOs that I'd feel comfortable babysitting my teenage daughter

[–] Nighed@feddit.uk 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The company I work for is an Azure shop. However, our provider for customer 2fa tokens uses AWS.... So still in trouble.

[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 14 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Once Larry Ellison owns TikTok he's going to be babysitting all the teenagers and a whole bunch of other people!

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[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Lemmy seemed fine, Reddit did not.

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 23 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Lemmy seemed fine

Federated, open source

Reddit did not

Centralized, corporate

[–] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

That doesnt really have anything to do with this issue. Lemmy can absolutly be hosted in AWS via ECS (or EKS if you love Kubernetes). Hell, it could be hosted directly on EC2 if preferred.

Federation as a whole is more resilient because each operator can chose whatever hosting solution they prefer. But if your particular server happened to be hosted in AWS in the useast1 region; your shit was gonna be a bit busted.

[–] vegals@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Amen to that, good thing though. Got me to learn what Lemmy was. Apparently I've been under a rock.

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[–] betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 81 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I brought down all my department's services to take a day off and blame it on Amazon. Next year when negotiating a raise/budget increase, I'll point to this incident and take credit for migrating us off AWS after six months of in-person training classes (either in places I haven't visited or would like to see again) and another six months of hard work in the office (napping in the server room).

2026 is looking pretty good already and I definitely won't regret tempting fate by saying that.

[–] mr_pip@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

great idea! show us your nap setup! sitting or lying down?

[–] vegals@lemmy.world 18 points 3 days ago
[–] HeyJoe@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

It's sad that none of these people you deal with don't know what service they use or vendors they deal with? That sounds fantastic for you, scary for everyone else.

This isn't even a shower thought

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 63 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The really stupid thing is that even if you weren't in AWS east us 1 you were still boned because that is where AWS does it's service authentication.

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I love it when Cloud companies pretend there are "serverless" services that are "location-transparent"

You know, they sell this crap to governments and have to follow compliance regimes like FedRAMP but yet... this happens

But the only way to do this is to have a CSO willing to invest heavy in red-teaming -- for attacks of every kind the team can brainstorm -- and a CEO willing to spend the $$ and attention to get their recommendations implemented.

[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 56 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I just want AWS, Azure, Google, & Cloudflare to go down at the same time.

And maybe stay down.

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 28 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

If a nation wants to go to war with the US ... this is how they do it, they just shut down one, two or all of these systems down and watch the country go crazy. It wouldn't destroy the country, just disrupt it enough to make them go nuts and then do more things to them in other ways.

It's amazing when you think about it, first the US invested in heavily defending and arming itself in the 60s, 70s and 80s ... then it spent billions more in the 90s and 2000s to try to come up with ever more inventive ways to screw itself from the inside.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 29 points 3 days ago (4 children)

No. Everyone always focuses on the flashy stuff like datacenters but the truth is that the most vulnerable, overtaxed, and underfunded weak-spot for the United States is the electric grid.

Yup. Most of our core electrical infrastructure is over 100 years old now. And thanks to a combination of NIMBYism, profiteering, and the anti-nuclear brigades, we're not likely to see that change any time soon.

[–] ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

I'm pretty convinced that if we did have a complete grid failure, we wouldn't be able to complete a cold start.

Too many people would be pushing for their section to be started first so they could short the market first.

Edit: my proofreading sucks

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

Doesn't matter who wants want, the power company has contingency plans and those plans are what is happening.

SOURCE: Worked for Cox after a major ice storm smashed north-central Oklahoma flat. Lived Hurricane Ivan and saw their rollout priorities.

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[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 3 days ago

Note to self: Sabotage the US' electric grid.

[–] YoSoySnekBoi@kbin.earth 8 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Which in turn would take down the datacenters too, so same effect, just more severe

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[–] justsomeguy@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

I feel like you got it backwards. Letting them run is doing more damage than turning them off would.

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[–] WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 36 points 3 days ago (2 children)

We all fund the devil pretending we don't know.

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[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 21 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Same, Canvas is perhaps the most used Learning Management System in the US and they apparently are entirely hosted on AWS East. The real kicker is I had my students midterm due date literally today for two classes. I've been swamped with panic emails (and I made clear my due dates aren't even that important when there isn't a national outage lol).

My head canon is someone wished for a miracle due date extension somewhere in the country and they monkey's pawed AWS into non existence.

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[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Is atlassian scum? Confluence was acting all kinds of fucking terrible today.

[–] Zikeji@programming.dev 17 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I wouldn't look at it that way. Even companies not leveraging AWS directly will be impacted.

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[–] popcornpizza@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 3 days ago

In my country, a lot of the non-traditional bank apps are still down, with millions of people having lost access to their money. Can't even buy groceries, pay the bills, or anything.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 days ago

My wife and I are at Disneyland today, and their site is down. xD

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