When Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service at Amazon’s US-EAST-1 data centers went down, things went bad. Very, very bad.

How bad? Popular sites such as Quora, Business Insider, Netflix, Reddit and Slack either crashed entirely or were broken. By SimilarTech’s count, over 124,000 sites were affected. A college student told me, “It’s knocked out my school’s technology back end. Students are freaking out because they can’t access assignments.” A cloud consultant told me his phone was ringing off the hook by Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers who wanted to switch to Azure.

You get the idea. It was Bad with a capital B.

And, what caused this multimillion-dollar fiasco? A typo.

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