A tech worker’s Reddit post about missing Diwali celebrations due to an unexpected AWS outage has gone viral, striking a chord with many in the IT community.
The post, shared under a tech subreddit, begins with a warning the employee gave his manager a week earlier, “Told my manager last week…not to put me oncall during Diwali… I’ll not be able to handle all alone.”
His manager brushed it off, reportedly saying, “Relax, nothing ever happens this time of the year.”
But things took a sharp turn on Diwali night when Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a major outage, disrupting services across multiple platforms. “Fast forward to tonight. AWS is down. Teams are blowing up. Pager won’t stop ringing. My family think I work for the government because I’m handling some emergency.”
“I haven’t even lit a single patakha yet, but my whole screen’s glowing red. Happy Diwali, I guess,” the techie wrote.
The incident triggered an outpouring of support and shared frustration on Reddit. Many users recounted similar experiences of being dragged into emergency fixes during holiday periods due to cloud service failures.
One commenter described how their team faced confusion over on-call shifts, “The person assigned to oncall mentioned on Friday that he wouldn’t be available this week… Later, he said someone else had agreed to take over. But today, when the outage happened, neither of them was available and a third person had to step in after some time.”
The user further added, “This whole incident just shows why releases shouldn’t be done on weekends. AWS messed things up, no idea what they did this time. Thank god I am not oncall this week.”
Some also offered advice and comfort to the original poster, “You can’t do anything unless your company has some Disaster Recovery that is not tied to AWS,” said one user.
Another wrote, “What people usually fail to understand, even if OP’s system is heavily dependent on AWS, what matters is how fast you are able to failover if that’s possible, or how fast you are able to get back once AWS is back.”
“Acknowledge and ignore. Unless you’re working for AWS, this is what you can do right now,” a user wrote.