An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday disrupted apps and websites worldwide, affecting more than 2,000 companies and leaving millions unable to access services such as Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, Duolingo and even Amazon's own operations. The 15-hour crash forced workers to be sent home and exams to be delayed, highlighting how deeply digital lives depend on a small number of cloud providers and how vulnerable everyday systems are to a single failure.
If data is the new oil, then cloud computing is the pipeline, the refinery, the tanker fleet and, increasingly, the pump too. The big three – AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – account for 60% of global cloud computing. They own the networks and cables that move data across the world, and their proprietary tools make switching providers costly and complex. Through Amazon's Alexa, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, they also shape how people interact with data and services.
All information processing happens in buildings full of servers connected to the internet via fibre-optic cables. Amazon's largest and most critical cloud region, US-EAST-1, is located in northern Virginia and handles 70% of the world's internet traffic. Virginia's role is comparable to the Strait of Hormuz for oil tankers – a narrow choke point vulnerable to technical error, cyber-attacks, geopolitical sabotage and terrorism. This was the cluster's third major outage in five years, each leading to an internet meltdown.
In a paper for University College London, Francesca Bria, Paul Timmers and Fausto Gernone warn that cloud computing is the power grid of the 21st-century economy. Europe's public services, industrial innovation and AI ambitions are increasingly built on a digital backbone it does not own, regulate or fully understand. The outage is a warning shot, not a technical blip.
The authors recommend scaling up sovereign cloud infrastructure, diversifying hardware supply chains and developing open-source standards. India and Brazil are prioritising public digital systems to reduce reliance on foreign cloud providers. Germany and France have pushed Gaia-X, a European framework for secure cloud services. The supermarket Lidl is building its own cloud tech. Troublingly, Britain has no coherent cloud strategy, leaving its systems dominated by AWS and Microsoft.
In a debate organised by UCL this summer, Mike Bracken, former head of the UK's Government Digital Service, argued that adopting open standards could provide cloud advantages without reinventing the wheel. But this risks underplaying the strategic vulnerabilities of depending on private, foreign-owned cloud giants. Sovereignty is not just the right to choose policy but the power to execute it without permission. True resilience means not relying on foreign servers to keep passengers flying, NHS hospitals running, banking apps working and government services online.
