(Or, The Risk of a Networking Monoculture)

We’ve all heard the saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” The same idea applies to technology. When too many companies rely on the same provider—like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, or Google—it’s called a monoculture. And just like in farming, a monoculture can be risky. If one major system fails, the effects can spread fast.

The internet was originally designed to be decentralized, meaning if one part failed, data could travel another route. That made it strong and resilient. But over time, convenience and cost savings have led many organizations to depend on just a few big players. When one of them has problems, millions of people feel it.

The AWS Outage: A Real-World Example

Recently, an AWS outage took down some of the most popular apps and websites around the world. Platforms like Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, Duolingo, Wordle, PlayStation Network, and Peloton all had issues. In the UK, services including Lloyds Bank, HM Revenue and Customs, and Ring doorbells also went offline.

By mid-morning, Amazon said it was fixing problems in its US-East-1 region (Virginia), but recovery was slow. According to Downdetector, more than 1,000 companies were affected, and there were over 6.5 million reports of service issues. Even by late afternoon, some problems weren’t completely resolved.

Why It Matters

Experts around the world warned that we’re depending too heavily on a few cloud companies:

  • Dr. Corinne Cath-Speth (ARTICLE 19): “We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. Critical digital infrastructure must not rest in a few hands.”
  • Cori Crider (Future of Technology Institute): “Outages like this show the danger of leaving critical systems at the mercy of US tech giants.”
  • Madeline Carr (University College London): “While large firms offer scale and security, this concentration is a risky position for the world.”

The takeaway? Companies like AWS and Cloudflare provide incredible tools, but their dominance also creates a single point of failure. When one goes down, it’s not just an inconvenience—it can disrupt businesses, schools, hospitals, and government services worldwide.

What Actually Happened

According to Amazon, the outage was caused by a problem with an internal subsystem that monitors the health of network load balancers—the tools that help spread traffic across multiple servers. This failure caused errors in other AWS services, including Lambda, a computing system that runs code in the cloud.

AWS said it took steps to recover those systems, but it took many hours for things to return to normal.

The Bigger Lesson

The AWS incident is a reminder that diversity equals strength—not just in nature, but in technology too.
When too much of the world’s digital infrastructure depends on too few companies, one small glitch can ripple out into a global problem.

To keep the internet—and our businesses—safe and stable, we need to support diversity, decentralization, and competition in cloud services. Because the next big outage isn’t a matter of if—it’s a matter of when.

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