baltimore schools, i have seen no news about this but it's Bad, all y'all performatively avoiding shopping at amazon don't understand this, but amazon doesn't make its money selling you shit, they make their money powering the whole internet, that's what they do, and there's nothing you can do about that

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porcupine-girl https://porcupine-girl.tumblr.com/post/635889033983164416:

woozapooza https://woozapooza.tumblr.com/post/635882542488289280:

kendallroy https://kendallroy.tumblr.com/post/635869389518979072:

literally cannot stop laughing at this

and remember maryland (unhinges jaw as black smoke pours from my ears and

mouth) https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/kendallroy/search/and+remember+maryland+(unhinges+jaw+as+black+smoke+pours+from+my+ears+and+mouth)

The “take place tonight” in the middle of the elder god monologue is the most ominous part.

So what makes that extra terrifying is that this alert came out about ten hours after the Baltimore school system got ransomware-hacked and my sister’s kids could no longer log in to do their remote learning. We don’t know if they’ll have school again tomorrow, or what.

Also, at the time, one of Amazon’s main servers https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/25/aws_down/ that powers much of the Internet’s infrastructure was down for, at the time, entirely unknown reasons. (OK, to be nerdy, Kinesis, which is a system within US-East-1, and powers high-volume data streams, had crashed, because Amazon Web Services was in the midst of adding capacity to the service and it went down hard and they couldn’t get it back up for nearly 24 hours. Unfortunately Kinesis also powers their support call logging system and the status update page, so they were totally unresponsive. So, an enormous amount of the Internet just didn’t work and there was a black hole instead of any kind of answers as to why.)

My BIL works for the Maryland National Guard, and my Dude works for a company that relies heavily on Kinesis, so both of them had an extremely tense day of “well I’m off so it’s Not My Problem but what the fuuuuuuck am I going to come back to” the day before Thanksgiving.

(Did U Know, part of what the National Guard does in all 50 states is that they have online security that they help their state governments with, and Baltimore had suffered a terrible ransomware attack in 2019, and the National Guard had just said hey guys we really ought to come in and help you make sure your other municipal sites are tight because there’s a lot riding on these school systems, and they hadn’t done it yet, so. BIL just Can’t Wait for Monday back at work.)

(Dude, on the other hand, just spent all of today scrolling back through the work chatlogs and sipping his coffee like hmmm well this is gonna be fun.)

So I don’t know what prompted Maryland to push this notification but it’s worth mentioning I did also see a clean version of this alert posted on Twitter, screencapped by someone who had received it… in Delaware… who was like… since when does Maryland need to send me push notifications…

Anyway the Internet which we all increasingly rely on not just for entertainment but for the very fabric of our lives is run by a shaky conglomeration of for-profit services inefficiently patched-together which are under no obligation to continue so let that terrify you for a while, guys!