For what it is worth, I didn’t experience any issues.
Technical explanation (hard to summarize other than “real realizability is had and probably not cheap”
Brian
Europe here. Amazon works a usual, no disturbances anywhere (for a change).
I’m having trouble understanding why a restaurant would be unable to operate without AWS.
Me, too! I’ll ask them when I finally go (likely in the next week).
Could be several things, but most likely it’s payment and reservation processing in the cloud.
Or their entire kitchen management system. All those tablets & terminals the waitstaff use tie into the kitchen. And the supply ordering for tomorrow based on what sold today.
All that stuff is in the cloud and if one sub-component of the whole thing is down, it’s down. A new restaurant may not have adequate manual backup procedures given that their store automation vendor guarantees (warrantees?) there won’t be outages. Oops.
Perhaps it’s cheaper and easier to simply close than have a day or two of chaos that will make its way onto social media without any benefit of the doubt or any details about AWS being out that day.
Or bad web design. I see a lot of restaurants where if you try to see a menu or even get to the front page that automatically pull up the reservation system or ordering system. If those go down your entire website is non-functioning.
I hate it when they do that. I can understand why, since they don’t have to maintain a separate menu webpage or PDF that way, but those online ordering things take forever to load on a slow phone connection. And they often have their own prices that aren’t the same as the in-store prices.
I hate it because I want to see your menu first. I’m not ready to order nor do I even know if I want to order from you.
Yes. Huge pet peeve with restaurants that don’t have online menus and assume their online to-go / delivery order system serves the same purpose.
Well for me it serves the purpose of ensuring I eat elsewhere.
At least they have webpages… so many of the ones around here don’t have any sort of online presence at all, except that one low-res photo a random customer happened to take of their menu 6 years ago =/
Our local phở restaurant finally got one of those online ordering things a few months ago, to accompany their remodel. It lasted a whole three weeks before the whole website got hacked and now redirects to some crypto-lottery-blackjack-scam, sigh.
I haven’t been to a restaurant like this in a while, but I’ve seen restaurants in Vegas and Mexico where you just have a QR code at the table and you have to scan that to get the menu.
It was a neat novelty at first, but dammit I like having an actual menu I can hold.
And if that site is down, no menu.
Wait, you don’t have those anymore where you live? Every restaurant did that during Covid, and even now, in 2025, about 25% - 35% of the restaurants we visit (in the US) still rely on the QR codes instead of paper menus. It was even worse abroad.
A few places still have the QR codes to pay as the new normal after covid.
Nope. I have not seen that in quite a while.
Nothing at the restaurants I visit in the greater Seattle area at least.
And now that you mention it, it was in the pandemic days I saw them… Not the “have to wear a mask to go anywhere” time, but not long after that. When I was in Mexico, I had to take a Covid test to be allowed back in the US (and of course my whole family tested negative).
The QR codes for menus seem to be making a resurgence since the uncontrolled inflation of the current administration. Much easier to update that website with new prices every month than to reprint all the large format cardstock menus.
Having said that, QR code menus aren’t common here in SoFL, but they’re also not head-scratchingly rare. My attitude is an eyeroll and a “Really?” Typically it’s midmarket places.
Good observation. I most often see these at mediocre franchisees than family-run small restaurants or upscale establishments.
I guess the cost of printing 20 menus every few months isn’t a big deal, but if you had 200,000… a shitty QR code could make that a lot cheaper.
Not too common here as well. And the last two places that had them the wait staff brought me traditional menus while I was trying to log on the QR thingy.
I suspect a lot of the QR code stickers, table tents, etc. are like the 6 foot social distancing stickers. They got stuck on or put out, and it’s work to remove them, so they’ll be there until they wear off naturally.
Heh, I saw a post about Amazon having a bad day today in our Service (help) Desk channel at work. I don’t think it affected us. I never saw any problems.
All our servers are internal. Perhaps that’s why. I donno. I’m not a network guy.