Yesterday, after the Amazon outage, I tweeted a comment highlighting the difficulties faced by AWS customers (applicable, in general, to all public cloud customers) when there is an outage. It was a tweet meant to highlight how desperate the situation becomes for AWS customers as well as AWS employees. I compared the situation after such outages with the kind of issues organizations in New York were facing after 9/11 in the context of business continuity.

Please keep in mind that I have included “for stake holders” in my comments and have added a hashtag to make a disclaimer about the very comparison of the two situations.

To this tweet, I get a pretty reasonable response from a tech journalist though it is quite possible that she didn’t get the context in which I am talking and the audience I am addressing through Twitter (folks with deep interest in cloud computing).

It was followed by another tweet that was pretty much clueless about the context in which I am making a comparison between AWS outage and 9/11. She picked on the response of Ms. Clay to my original tweet and added her own take (and it has no bearing to what I was talking in the organizational context in the aftermath of 9/11).

Soon there was another response to it which directly ridiculed me for my tweet

Though Ms. Bolsinger didn’t intend to bully me, it was a pretty bad response to my original tweet that was made regarding the issues faced by organizations in the aftermath of AWS outage. But this response highlights a fact about social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, etc.. The mass hysteria and real lack of attention among the people using these tools could end up having disastrous consequences. The recent increase in online bullying is a fallout of such hysteria we see in these sites. Just look at what people could say on a commentary on technology under the cover of “patriotism”. Think about how such mass hysteria can impact a commentary on socio-political issues. If you thought the impact of 24/7 news media is a problem, the social media driven hysteria is going to be a much bigger problem. May be Nick Carr’s assertion on The Shallows needs a serious consideration!! #enufsaid