On Monday, October 20, a series of Autodesk servers went temporarily offline. “I am experiencing some issues with accessing my Revit license, and allocated products” a user posted at 12:44 a.m. ET on the Revit Architecture forum. Around 4:00 a.m., the health.autodesk.com website published the following message: “We are investigating a service disruption that is affecting multiple Autodesk Products. We are actively looking into this and we will provide an update within 60 minutes or sooner if we have more information to share.” The outage affected hundreds of Autodesk products, including Autodesk Construction Cloud, the global building information management and coordination platform. For those in active construction sites, in the middle of project reviews, or engulfed in request-for-information (RFI) procedures, work came to an abrupt stop. The outage continued for much of the day.
Some were quick to make jokes about this infrastructural paralysis: “Happy Revit is Down day for all those who celebrate,” one user quipped on X. Others were quite visibly and understandably frustrated. But the disruption was not limited to architecture and construction. Snapchat, Venmo, and Zoom, among hundreds of others, were also affected, causing many outlets to bring up once again the current state of over-reliance on the cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company whose services were responsible for the disruption. A Reuters piece used the term “fragile infrastructures” to describe this condition, with its author stating that the problem “highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life.”
Seen broadly, AWS’s failure signals a more paradigmatic transformation in our personal relationship to computing—namely its demise. Many media studies and science and technology studies scholars have been identifying key aspects of this transformation, so this is nothing new. There is no dearth of research into the politics of big data, surveillance capitalism, and what Ed Zitron has called “The Rot Economy” or the enshittification of software exemplified by Google’s deteriorating search feature.
Along those lines of critique, AWS’s latest episode illustrates that there really is no such thing as personal computing anymore. That is, your relationship with your computer is no longer intimate. And no matter how much you have customized your laptop settings or how much time you spend with screens, computing today is far from personal.
Thanks to cloud computing, software-as-a-service platforms and all those invisible infrastructures that caused a global communications outage, computer users are significantly more removed from acts of computing than they used to be. In architecture, many firms have since the COVID pandemic transitioned to virtual workstations, an office setup where PCs simply stream a virtual desktop with all the subscribed software pre-installed. This means that employees no longer have a personal computer at work; their hardware is just a portal to a desktop that exists as an instance booted from the cloud, through which files and all required data is also streamed from other cloud storage servers. It’s clouds all the way down.
This virtualization of computer work poses an interesting paradox wherein computer users are both deeply immersed in technology but also simultaneously alienated from these systems. You can’t, for example, download a file to the virtual machine because it will disappear at the end of the day (unless you save it to a server). This, together with current discussions about lack of ownership of digital media, illustrates a deep fracturing of what was once an intimate relationship with computing.
Perhaps it’s not necessary to have an intimate relationship with your work computer. In fact, some would argue that it promotes a healthy live-work balance. Maybe Autodesk Construction Cloud going down gives users more time for reflection or even a well-earned break. But that might be a naïvely optimistic perspective. In 2020, a collection of firms wrote an open letter to Autodesk expressing deep disenchantment with the company’s approach to product development, pricing, and licensing. As far as I know, nothing has really changed and given the number of products that went down globally during the AWS outage, the company seems to have expanded their reliance on cloud services.
If personal computing is about control, then a summary of our current relationship to PCs and software is simply that we have lost most control over these technologies. When PCs were first introduced into the home and the office, they were regarded as affordable, liberatory tools. Even Apple’s infamous 1984 Macintosh ad promised some form of liberation. But now many of us can’t say where our files are at any given point. As the historian Mario Carpo pointed out years ago, we now search for data rather than purposely organize it. We blindly allow our software to automatically update and install features that we have never asked for. Where once, this was considered a kind of violation of your personal space (Remember the unwanted Yahoo! toolbars?), we now regard it as the inevitable price of user-friendliness.
Although they have direct access to our personal data, our computers are no longer our own. They are controlled and managed by external actors in faraway places. We essentially lease time on servers to do our work and personal tasks, borrowing pieces of a fragile infrastructure on an as needed basis. This will only increase as cloud-based AI usage intensifies.
When AWS went down, one unexpected client that experienced issues was Eight Sleep, a smart mattress manufacturer. Users reported that their mattresses were unresponsive and many features such as sleep tracking and temperature control turned off. But why would a mattress need to connect to the cloud in the first place? It feels weird that the same servers that host our Revit files are also in charge of people’s beds. I suppose that’s personal in a different way.
Galo Canizares is a designer, writer, and educator currently researching the sociotechnical networks of relations between design’s softwarization and the architectural imagination. He is the author of Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-Based Planet, a collection of essays on software and design.
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