When Half The Internet Fails, Your Plan Shouldn’t

A major AWS outage knocked out payments, flights, and popular apps, exposing how fragile centralized systems can be. We walk through the failure cascade, why silver demand is surging, and a practical checklist to keep life moving when the cloud stalls.

• AWS Virginia zone failure and DNS bug
• Payment, travel and streaming disruptions
• 911 outages from fiber cuts in the Gulf South
• Why central choke points keep breaking
• Silver supply strain and industrial demand
• Coin shop behavior and premiums on rounds
• Cash, radios, maps and local backups
• Affordable solar power for communications
• Three-day cash drills and neighbor planning
• Concrete gear list with realistic costs

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Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Wake-Up Call
• 0:47 AWS Outage Unpacked
• 3:40 Fragile Infrastructure Stories
• 8:05 Silver Markets In Overdrive
• 12:23 Practical Preps You Need Now

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:17

To the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, where prepping doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Coming to you from a well-defended off-grid compound high in the mountains. Coming to you from his Florida room in Richmond, Virginia. Neither off-grid nor well-defended, unless you count as chickens and cats, here is your host, Keith.

SPEAKER_01: 0:40

Hey folks, this is Keith and welcome back to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, October 20th, 2025. And if the events in the last 24 to 36 hours have not convinced you of a need to prepare, I am not sure what will. So about 12 to 14 hours ago, give or take, AWS, the Amazon cloud, crashed, knocking out approximately half of the internet across the globe. We'll get into that in more detail in a minute. Silver is up again. Remember, we talked about silver solar panels, EV batteries, AI, data centers, and everything that keeps your smart lights smart and your smart devices even smarter. So we are not talking about conspiracy theories, we're talking about math. Crowded wires, crowded clouds, and silver, the one metal that's about to become harder to find than cash during a crash. So let's turn this fear, outrage, panic, or whatever you want to call it into quiet confidence because preppers do not wait for permission. All right, back to the AWS. So picture Monday morning, October 20th. You wake up, your phone is lagging, and the AWS Virginia Zone, which is in Dulles, Virginia, is host to 30% of the global apps. Apparently got choked out on a DNS bug. Within a minute, Venmo freezes your rent, Delta kicks you off standby, ring feeds to your cameras blackout. I still don't have my ring cameras back up. And everybody goes to X to talk about what's going on. You can't pay for gas with a card. Spotify crashes mid-toon. And I read a quote from a pilot. That's four million flights worth of data that's glitching because of a database hiccup. So AWS said things would be up by noon today, roughly five hours ago, and it is not. There was a partial comeback with a lot of websites, but then there was another issue that popped up and it brought them back down. No heads up, and that's how fast it can flip from a minor meltdown to a major situation. And this isn't new. This has happened several times before. 2021, the cloud went down, Twitch went down. Last year's CrowdStrike update, if you remember that, bricked hundreds of thousands of window computers worldwide. It's the same pattern. There's a central choke point, no redundancy with zero customer protection. So if you're banking on cloud apps only, you probably got taken out by this crash. Maybe your GPS doesn't work. So when the grid talks back, it doesn't ask if you're ready. It's gonna do what it wants to do. Very similar to Mother Nature. Mother Nature does not tell you or care that you are prepared for a hurricane or not, that you prepared for tornado season in the Midwest. Mother Nature doesn't care. So back on September 25th, a Gulf South crew in Mississippi was digging an area out for a playground. Their shovel ran into an ATT fiber trunk, not just a few lines, but a trunk. Within seconds, 911 calls fell silent in Mississippi, Louisiana, parts of Alabama. Somebody from New Orleans says, I used 311 for emergencies, but if your house is flooding, 311 won't cut it. Dispatchers scrambled and they were able to reroute some calls, but some just vanished off their screen. I read where one gentleman in Jackson, Mississippi, his wife went into labor. He called 911 five times, couldn't get a hold of them, so he drove he and his wife to the hospital 25 miles away, which obviously wasn't affected by the 911 fiber optic cut. Remember, fiber optic cable, if you've ever seen it, it's as thin as a strand of hair. And this was a trunk, so probably several hundred strands, if not several thousand strands, of this fiber optic. So California's PG and E, they're in the same type of situation. Texas with floods, Alaska with floods. I'm not sure if you're aware of that, not getting a lot of play in the media. Terrible floods in Alaska, Midwest tornadoes, blackouts. You pair a blackout with an AWS cloud crash, and that's very, very bad news. So back to silver. So while the tech stocks stutter, silver is going bananas again. On the way home Friday, I went to my local coin shop just to see what was going on. The line was out the door. So I stood there for a few minutes watching the people in front of me, and they were all up at the counter, and the folks at the local coin store were helping them. Every person in front of me, I believe there were five or six, were selling gold and selling silver. One young lady had a plastic tub full of little jewelry boxes, like ring boxes, that sort of thing. She had gold spread out all over the counter. The guy checked it out, he weighed it, and then he came up with a number. He had to take her in the back to get out that much cash from the safe. People went ahead of me again, selling, selling, selling, wads of cash being handed to these people like I've never seen before. They actually ran out of cash. And at one point, the owner of the coin store looked around and says, Is anybody buying anything today with cash? Well, guess whose hand goes up in the air? So I was moved to the front of the line to make my purchase, give them cash so they could turn around and help the people that were still in front of me. That's how crazy it was. One EV battery takes about 40 ounces. So a solar farm? I can't imagine. Tons of silver. Data centers. Silver paste in cooling chips for data centers. Was not aware that was a thing until I looked it up. There is a mine in Mexico that pumps out 27 million ounces a year. Peru is barely breathing because of the uptick in silver. So JP Morgan shorted silver thinking that it would bring the price down, and it did the absolute opposite. Refineries are jammed, some refineries are out of silver. London's vaults are empty. There's actually vaults in London that hold their silver. And Chinese buyers are skipping the major commodity exchanges to purchase their silver, either physical or virtual, and they are going straight to these mines to try to fill out contracts to get physical silver from these mines. Talk about cutting out the middleman. They're cutting out probably three or four middlemen in this entire situation. So this all translates to everybody is really scared. And if delivery demands continue to spike, it's going to cause an industrial panic, panic buying, prices going to 60 easily. Some folks saying maybe a hundred before the year is over. So folks that have the discretionary income, silver at this price is probably a really good purchase because I don't see it coming down at all. So a generic one ounce silver round, and like the most generic one-ounce silver round, is a round that has a buffalo head on one and then an Indian head on the back. That's like one of the more generic ones. If you go into a local coin shop and say, Do you have any generic silver rounds with an Indian head or the buffalo? They know exactly what you're talking about. There are several mints that make those. Some are prettier than others. So remember, with your silver, store it in a fireproof safe at home. Put some in a little zippered bag and put it in your car under your seat. If you're gonna bury it buried in multiple locations, if you trust your friends and neighbors and they're part of your prepping group, something you might want to consider. So currently, right now, that silver round will run you approximately$54, and that's with the$2 premium added to spot. If you go to some of these websites, they're selling silver rounds at five and six dollars over spot. Again, supply and demand. A lot of people want it, the price is gonna go up. That's why in this situation, I recommend going to your local coin store. If you have to drive a few miles, it's definitely worth the money you're going to save by buying it in person as opposed to over the internet. So let's go over some things that you should have as a prepper. Have it in your bug out bag or have it in your home readily available in case of a significant SHTF situation. So there's a major hurricane, no cell coverage, an AWS crash, you can't Venmo anybody.$29 an Amazon give or take will get you the Balfang UV5R programmed with local repeaters. Remember to get your ham license, you can study online, your kids' school app down during an AWS panic, a printed paper list for the teachers, pickup plans, meds, laminate that, stick it on the fridge with a magnet. Have you ever tried to pay for something without your debit card for three days? Go three days. I couldn't. Go three days, and when you gas, go three days, and when you get gas, you'll pay cash. When you go to the grocery store, you pay cash. I couldn't do that for three days. I don't have, like I've preached, I don't have that emergency cash set aside for situations like this. You get the Baofang, paper maps. I did get some paper maps, cash and silver.$300 worth of cash,$300 worth of silver. Those five silver rounds will cost you about$250, and then you have your$300 in cash in small bills. For power, a Jackery 300 solar generator, about$275. Charge your phone, charge your radios, charge your hotspot. In situations like this, like I've said before, it's very important to reach out to your friends, to reach out to your neighbors. Have conversations about what happened today. Have conversations about what you have done to mitigate the AWS crash. You might be surprised as that being a conversation starter between you and what ends up being some like-minded people. Remember, folks, when SHTF happens, the government is not coming to save you. Today, the internet is not coming to save you. So do me a favor, like this podcast, share this podcast, and please give me a review. It really helps the algorithm. And if it sounds like I'm under the weather, I am. I jacked up my back over the weekend. So between the steroids and the flexorel, I sound like death warmed over, but my back is on the mend. Folks, situations like this can be scary, and I'm sure there's a bunch of people running around that have no clue what's going on. Maybe they weren't affected. But let me give you a short list of the things that were affected by this AWS crash. Of course, the Amazon Cloud, AWS itself, Snapchat, FanDuel, not to be confused with OnlyFans, not that I would know, Ancestry.com, Venmo, Verizon, Ring, PlayStation, League of Legends, if you play League, Reddit, Instacart, Zoom, Chime, and it just goes on and on. DoorDash, Netflix, Roku, YouTube, I could go on. And some of those have started to recover, but some of them have not. So folks, in situations like this, this is the real deal. And although, so in the big scheme of things, I don't want to say this is just a minor glitch, but what if this continues for two or three days? But today's exercise was just a small, small portion of a truly dangerous situation that could develop in the event the cloud is not brought back to life and people are able to continue their lives and do just normal daily tasks. So please heed this warning. Please start prepping. And folks, as always, more than ever, please be careful out there. Take care of one another. And until next time.