There’s a moment in tech journalism that no one really prepares you for.

It’s not the product launches. Not the flashy keynotes. Not even the embargo drops from companies like Apple or Google.

It’s the outage.

A few weeks ago, at 9:42 AM, my phone lit up like it was New Year’s Eve. Messages from group chats. DMs from founders. Slack notifications exploding. One sentence repeated over and over:

“Is everything down for you too?”

Within minutes, reports confirmed that services powered by Amazon Web Services were experiencing issues. Which meant apps people rely on daily — from project management tools to food delivery platforms — started blinking offline.

Fourteen minutes.

That’s how long it took for panic to trend.

As a tech news reporter, this is where instinct kicks in. You verify. You cross-check status pages. You message PR contacts who are definitely not having a calm morning. You draft three versions of the headline because the difference between “minor disruption” and “widespread outage” matters.

But what struck me wasn’t the technical failure.

It was how quickly we all felt it.

Tech coverage often focuses on innovation — AI breakthroughs, billion-dollar valuations, the next device that promises to “change everything.” We treat infrastructure like background noise. Invisible. Stable. Permanent.

Until it isn’t.

For those 14 minutes, productivity paused. Delivery drivers couldn’t confirm orders. Teams couldn’t log into dashboards. Customers couldn’t check out. Entire workflows froze because a few servers somewhere hiccupped.

We live in a world stacked on layers of code and cloud agreements we barely think about.

When those layers shake, even briefly, you realize how centralized “the internet” really is.

By 9:56 AM, most services were restored. Statements were issued. Traffic normalized. The cycle moved on.

But I kept thinking about how fragile it all felt.

The future of tech isn’t just about faster chips or smarter AI. It’s about resilience. Redundancy. Transparency.

Because innovation grabs headlines.

Stability keeps the world running.