A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has disrupted apps and websites worldwide, reigniting concerns about the internet's over-reliance on a handful of cloud providers. The glitch, which began on Monday morning, affected platforms including Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, Duolingo, and Amazon's own retail site and Ring doorbell service.
According to Downdetector, over 2,000 companies were impacted, with 8.1 million user reports globally, including 1 million in the UK. Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and HM Revenue and Customs were among the UK entities affected. Amazon reported that all services returned to normal by Monday evening, but the incident highlighted vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure.
Experts warned that the concentration of cloud services among a few tech giants—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—poses significant risks. Dr Corinne Cath-Speth of Article 19 called for urgent diversification in cloud computing, while Cori Crider of the Future of Technology Institute stated that the UK cannot leave its critical infrastructure at the mercy of US tech firms.
The outage originated from AWS's US-East-1 region in Virginia, causing ripple effects globally. This incident follows last year's CrowdStrike outage, which was described as the largest in history. Professor Madeline Carr of University College London noted that while hyper-scalers have resources for resilience, the current dependency is a risky position for the world.
