AWS outage reveals the internet's weakest link

A single server failure at Amazon Web Services revealed a deeper structural weakness: The world’s digital economy is too concentrated in too few hands.

- Cory Alpert

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centre in the US. AWS controls about 30 per cent of the global cloud computing market.

(PHOTO: REUTERS)

When one of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) servers went down this week, so did a chunk of the internet, from Apple Music to Snapchat to the PlayStation Network and Reddit, exposing how deeply one company’s servers underpin the modern digital economy.

AWS controls about 30 per cent of the global cloud computing market, with another 35 per cent shared between Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The outage hit everyone from small retail operations processing customer transactions to major corporations and technology services providers, whose operations ground to a halt on Oct 20.

This disruption, like the Cloudflare outage in 2023, raises uncomfortable questions around the concentration in the world’s digital infrastructure. For the last 10 years, the default approach has been to outsource computing power to the big three cloud providers instead of investing in local equivalents. Building and maintaining a new cloud platform requires billions in capital, and few non-US firms have either the resources or the incentive to take on that challenge.

The outage has exposed the fragility of that dependence. Much of the world’s digital backbone still revolves around its spiritual home in Silicon Valley and its satellite in Seattle, concentrating talent, investment and decision-making power in one geography. Silicon Valley’s gravity has ensured the global network has stayed centralised.