A recent outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) left millions of users unable to access popular websites and apps, raising questions about society’s dependence on a handful of cloud providers — and the difficulty of preventing future disruptions.

The Monday outage, reminiscent of last year’s CrowdStrike outage and the Rogers blackout of 2022, revealed just how much of the economy hinges on a single company.

Apps and Services Disrupted

Millions of users faced disruptions across multiple sectors:

• Social media platforms Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit
• Music streaming Spotify
• Food and drink ordering apps like Starbucks, DoorDash, Grubhub
• Ride-hailing app Lyft
• Payment services Venmo
• Video conferencing Zoom

Streaming services including Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video were affected, as were messaging apps WhatsApp and Signal. Even government operations in the U.K., including National Health Service platforms, experienced interruptions.

As Will Gottsegen of The Atlantic noted, “tech outages happen — but under our current system, a bad day for Amazon can be a bad day for everyone.”

Dominance of AWS in Cloud Computing

The outage underscores the risks of consolidation in cloud services. In the second quarter of this year, AWS held nearly one-third of the global cloud market, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud controlling significant portions as well. Together, the three companies account for more than 60 percent of cloud infrastructure worldwide, illustrating the scale of dependence on a few major providers.