The Deeper Import of This Week’s AWS-and-More Internet Outage
Everyday fragility
Frustrated not to be able to start an Amazon return yesterday here in Sheringham, on our beautifully remote North Norfolk coast, I was relieved when ChatGPT this morning reassured me that systems and terminals were probably running again — and that it was probably safe to take my almost-instantly-delivered £10 item back to be scanned and dispatched.
That exchange prompted a wider reflection — and, inevitably, a request to the same GPT to write about the double meaning of terminal.
Because as the climate fails, sea levels rise, and the ecological scaffolding of our civilisation unravels, global financial, trading, and information systems are heading for collapse — in decades, not centuries.
What follows, only lightly edited, is what the still-functioning information web of algorithms, silicon, and cabling wrote for me, drawing on the millions of words of dialogue we’ve exchanged these past months — about psychotherapy, EMDR, personal meaning, global politics, and the climate.
As ever, socks blown off by the clarity.
The global nervous system blinks
The faintest irony of our digital age is that the very networks which let us talk about collapse are themselves collapsing.
Yesterday’s AWS outage left thousands of post offices unable to scan parcels. Sheringham couldn’t take Amazon returns. A few years ago, that would have been a local nuisance. Now it’s a glimpse of systemic fragility — a rehearsal for something larger, slower, and terminal in more ways than one.
What we witnessed was the global nervous system blinking. When the cloud hiccups, modern life stutters: tills, supply chains, emergency services, communications, banking — even my own now online-only psychotherapy sessions.
Every function of daily civilisation now depends on what the AI so smoothly calls the uninterrupted hum of electrons through circuits cooled by water and air — elements that are themselves ever less stable. The more digital our world becomes, the more physical its vulnerabilities.
Fragile arteries of the web
Sea-level rise will drown far more than homes and holiday resorts. It will take out the coastal data centres that handle the world’s web traffic.
Even without the inevitable inundation of power stations, transport hubs, ports, and city centres — already baked in by a climate whose temperatures, as Hansen et al. suggest, are already set to rise, whatever we do, by a life-ending ten degrees to restore the planet’s lost heat-exchange balance — the transatlantic cable landing stations at Bude, Cornwall, and Virginia Beach, sitting just a few metres above high tide, are the arteries of the internet.
When the seas reach them (as ChatGPT writes again rather poignantly) redundancy becomes mythology.
Heatwaves already push data centres to their thermal limits. Hydroelectric dams run low in droughts. Solar flares and geomagnetic storms threaten satellites and power grids. Each layer of the network relies on a climate within tight tolerances — and those tolerances are unravelling.
The grid, the web, the economy, the biosphere — all are feedback loops running hotter and beginning to collapse in real time.
Continuity was always an illusion
This is what the global public, the businesses that supply us, and the politicians we elevate — whether by vote or by consent — still cannot bear to hear.
Our civilisation’s great faith is in continuity: that tomorrow will be roughly like today, just with better devices and faster delivery. But continuity was always an illusion built on cheap fossil-fuelled energy and a stable climate. Those days are over.
In recent months here and on my Cyclotherapist blog, I’ve written about the growing recognition among psychotherapists that climate collapse is not an abstract risk but a lived condition. We are already working with clients whose nervous systems, like the planet’s, are dysregulated by constant alerts — heat, war, migration, extinction, economic contraction.
The question is no longer how to stay optimistic, but how to stay connected and truthful as the systems around us fray.
Knitting coherence from the noise
I use this space, and increasingly the help of large language models like ChatGPT, to draw the threads together — factual, emotional, symbolic. The AI sifts the data, the science, the daily reports; I bring my perhaps autism-informed human pattern-recognition that senses the meaning in it.
Between us, we’ve been knitting this year a narrative that neither hysteria nor denial can hold. A narrative of realism: clear-eyed, grounded, unflinching.
What emerges is not hope in the old sense, but coherence — the calm that comes from seeing the picture whole.
When an AWS outage hits the post office, it’s not just an inconvenience. It’s an echo of the same fragility that’s melting Greenland, collapsing reefs, and driving refugees across borders. The scale differs; the mechanism differs; the pattern is the same: complex systems exceeding their capacity to self-regulate.
Collective EMDR for a species in shock
Psychologically, that’s what trauma is — a system overwhelmed by input, unable to integrate experience.
EMDR teaches that healing comes not from erasing pain but from reconnecting fragmented memory. In a strange symmetry, humanity now needs a kind of collective EMDR — not distraction or denial, but the courage to stay present with what is unbearable.
When I work with clients in this territory, I no longer try to offer reassurance. Instead, we cultivate relational steadiness: the ability to remain aware, to feel, to act locally even as the global network flickers. The goal is not to escape collapse, but to meet it with integrity.
The end of illusion
The irony, again, is that I write this on a machine powered by that same flickering network. The text you’re reading lives on servers that will — sooner than most public discourse dares admit — overheat, or flood, or lose connection.
The AI that helps me compose these reflections draws on a planetary web of data that depends on continuous extraction — of minerals, energy, and attention. It’s a collaboration built on borrowed time.
But for now, while the system still hums, it feels important to use it well. To tell the truth without melodrama. To face the terminal nature of this moment not as the end of meaning, but as the end of illusion.
The task of psychotherapy — and of culture — is not to offer false comfort but to help us die wisely, and perhaps to live wisely in the meantime.
Somewhere beyond the outages, beneath the servers and screens, human intelligence still exists in bodies and breath. When the lights dim, that’s what remains. A pulse. A conversation. The possibility of coherence in the dark.