The reliance of UK businesses on global hyperscalers has once again been called into question this morning following a major outage at AWS.
Many of the world’s largest apps and websites stopped working properly this morning, with disruption at AWS thought to be the cause.
According to a post on the AWS Health Dashboard at 11.35am UK time (3.35am Pacific time), most AWS Service operations are “succeeding normally now”.
That was around three-and-a-half hours after the dashboard first publicised news that the hyperscaler was investigating “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region”.
Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of AI startup Perplexity was among those to attribute the outages directly to AWS.
“Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it,” he wrote in a post on X.
Following last summer’s CrowdStrike-induced Windows PC meltdown, critics will inevitably see the outage as further evidence that the world has become too reliant on a small number of tech giants.
Simon Baxter, Research Director at tech analyst TechMarketView said this morning’s issue “highlights the fragility of many apps and systems that rely on the infrastructure of hyperscaler providers”.
“While the issue is already being resolved, with many of the affected apps back up and running, imagine a more disruptive scenario, driven through cyber-attacks or the actions of malicious foreign powers,” he said.
“Calls for more resilience and sovereign infrastructure continue to grow, but will we ever be able to truly mitigate the reliance we now place on the likes of Microsoft and AWS? I am not so sure.”
Nicky Stewart, Senior Advisor at the Open Cloud Coalition – an alliance established last year to champion openness, interoperability and fair competition in the cloud computing market – called the outage “a visceral reminder of the risks of over-reliance on two dominant cloud providers”.
“It’s too soon to gauge the economic fallout, but for context, last year’s global CrowdStrike outage was estimated to have cost the UK economy between £1.7 and £2.3bn,” she said.
“Incidents like this make clear the need for a more open, competitive and interoperable cloud market; one where no single provider can bring so much of our digital world to a standstill.”
