Critics say the web blackout is a wake-up call about our dependence on a handful of tech giants.
The internet looks limitless—millions of sites, countless apps—but more and more of it rests on the shoulders of a few companies. Over the last decade, businesses have shifted core IT to the cloud, chiefly to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Governments have followed suit: even the UK’s login system—set to underpin Labour’s planned digital ID—leans on cloud infrastructure.
On paper, the model is elegant. Instead of every organisation buying servers and networking gear, the “hyperscalers” build vast data centres and rent out capacity, tooling, and support. Startups skip eye-watering upfront costs; cloud providers earn steady, high-margin revenues. AWS, Amazon’s cloud arm, is the largest of the lot and significantly more profitable than Amazon’s retail business. Like power or water, cloud has become a utility—noticed mainly when it fails.
What went wrong on Monday
On Monday morning, a technical fault linked to AWS’s US East region rippled across the web. Lloyds Bank, HMRC, and the game Fortnite were among dozens of services knocked offline. Ring users couldn’t trigger emergency alarms; Snapchat users saw friend lists disappear; Duolingo learners worried about losing long streaks. Down Detector logged problems at more than 1,000 services.
Amazon traced the issue to the way certain web services accessed data from databases and pushed status updates as engineers worked the problem. Service was restored within hours. Even so, the incident underscored an uncomfortable truth: a vast slice of the internet shares the same points of failure.
A market dominated by a few
Research firm Gartner estimates AWS controls over one-third of the $172bn cloud infrastructure market. Together, Amazon and Microsoft account for more than 60% of global spending. Google is a distant third. Chinese providers Alibaba and Huawei rank next but are rarely chosen by Western customers, leaving an effectively three-player market in Europe and the US.
“The outage highlights how deeply the internet depends on a few dominant cloud providers,” said Grace Harmon of eMarketer.
Where did redundancy go?
Some experts argue the blame also lies with cloud customers. “Big firms have relied on a single provider—often AWS—without planning proper multi-cloud redundancy,” said Nishanth Sastry of the University of Surrey. “When something unusual happens, everyone is wrong-footed.”
The Open Cloud Coalition—which includes Google—called the blackout “a visceral reminder of the risks of over-reliance on two dominant providers,” and urged a market where “no single company can stall so much of our digital world.”
Regulators and risk managers take note
Regulators have been cautious. A recent Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) probe found Amazon and Microsoft may make it costly or difficult to switch to smaller rivals—citing egress fees and other practices—but stopped short of immediate action, deferring decisions until next year.
Financial regulators are moving faster on resilience. The Bank of England has pressed lenders to harden systems against cloud outages and said on Monday it was “in close contact with firms.” Under new rules, the Treasury can designate critical vendors—potentially including AWS—as “critical third parties” to the UK economy, opening the door to tighter oversight. Monday’s disruption may strengthen the case.
The bigger lesson
Cloud has delivered extraordinary speed, scale, and reliability to the modern internet. Yet the convenience of centralisation carries systemic risk. When one region at one provider stumbles, alarms ring across banking, government, consumer apps, and smart-home devices.
The path forward is hardly a secret: better multi-region and multi-cloud designs, clearer service-level guarantees, simpler portability between providers, and regulatory frameworks that reward resilience rather than lock-in. Until then, our “everywhere” internet will remain disarmingly concentrated—astonishingly powerful when it works, and startlingly fragile when it doesn’t.
