Amazon Cloud Outage Reveals Democratic Deficit in Relying on Big Tech

On Monday, a global technical failure at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, sent hundreds of applications and services from Snapchat and Signal to Fortnite and Lloyds Bank offline. Even a range of British government services were crippled by the fault.

While precise technical details have yet to be reported, here is what we know now: There was a significant technical issue beginning in Amazon Web Services’ ‘us-east-1’ region that brought down large portions of the internet, including services like Signal. Us-east-1 is one of AWS’s key geographic regions—a cluster of data centers where companies can host their cloud infrastructure. It is located in Northern Virginia, near the United States capitol.

The outage once again demonstrates how concentration in the computing industry—in this case, in cloud computing—can crash major parts of the internet, all at once. These disruptions are not just technical issues; they are democratic failures. When a provider of such a singular scale as AWS goes dark, critical services go offline with it. Media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves digital society crumbles.

Today is no exception, but this outage signals a worrisome trend. The 2024 Microsoft cloud-CrowdStrike outage revealed how essential services—from emergency responders to media organizations—were precariously reliant on a single cloud vendor. This reality points to the urgent need for diversification in cloud computing and a substantial reduction in reliance on these systems for societal critical functions. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.