Last week’s global outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) at its US-EAST-1 data center once again highlighted the often-overlooked hyper-centralization of our digital infrastructure. A seemingly remote failure, derived from an internal DNS resolution problem in a data center in Virginia disrupted services of all kinds around the world for hours, from Snapchat to bank services.
In Europe, where many companies assume their operations are governed by regulated frameworks and within European data centers, the impact was a double blow. Several European companies were affected, calling into question the idea of a digital ‘safe zone’. As The Guardian’s analysis explains, UK entities such as HMRC or Lloyds experienced disruptions, although they depend on local centers.
This is important: if a company based in Europe and subject to the GDPR or NIS2 regulation chooses a region like US-EAST-1 for reasons of cost or latency, it is giving up control over its data. In the event of a failure, the responsibility lies with the cloud provider, not with the state’s regulated infrastructure. Were those European companies really dependent on US-EAST-1, or did their networks go down because the networks that supply US-EAST-1 were overloaded? This raises the question of Service Level Agreements (SLAs): AWS guarantees a certain level of availability, but how many organizations verify their clauses in the face of a globally replicated “force majeure event”?
AWS SLAs compensate with service credits when availability falls below the agreed threshold, but they can rarely compensate for reputational losses or the breakdown of operations. In Europe, regulators could require providers to act as “critical infrastructure,” which would involve audits, resilience testing, and perhaps even mandatory redundancy in different regions.
As things stand, a European company may believe that it is well covered, but in reality, it is depending on a single region of the most dominant supplier in the world. When that region fails, business continuity, e-commerce, payments, and the customer experience break down. Contracts may contain promises of “>99.99% availability”, but do not provide for a simultaneous failure of thousands of client companies sharing the effects of the same platform failure.
In other words, we’re talking here about much more than a simple interruption: it questions the way we conceive of the cloud as a guarantee of resilience. The cloud is only as resilient as the people who design and operate it decide. Availability Zones and Regions exist on paper, but many organizations don’t use them properly, relying on legacy architecture standards and cost savings, rather than a true resiliency strategy.
Europe should see Monday’s events as a wake-up call: it must require suppliers operating in its territory to assume continuity obligations similar to those of public services. If a bank controls or relies on services that go down because a foreign data center outside the European Union fails, the responsibility cannot lie with the customer alone. At the same time, companies need to stop seeing the cloud as a cheaper alternative, because in many cases, it simply isn’t, and start seeing it as a critical piece of infrastructure with different costs, with redundancies and requiring built-in failure testing.
What AWS’s failure seems to have made clear is not just that the cloud went down again, but that our reliance on a single majority provider has turned the digital world into a highly vulnerable Tower of Babel. Instead of focusing on AI, blockchain or metaverses, perhaps we need to talk more about what happens when electrical power, a misconfigured switch or a DNS problem suddenly brings the entire ecosystem down. Because, the real threat lies not in the cloud, but in that no one has considered building a different sky from the one that went black yesterday.
—
This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project, please join us as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Photo credit: iStock
