[22336] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday on
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Oct 21 10:50:10 2025
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2025 07:39:57 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
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This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on the
widespread Amazon Web Services outage and the reliability of cloud
services. As always there may have been minor wording variations from
this script as I presented the report live on air.
- - -
Yeah, so you may have discovered that one of more of your favorite web
sites didn't seem to be working properly and may not have been
accessible at all. And this happened around the world to a vast number
of web sites including reportedly many important services. Just to
name a few in no particular order: Wall Street Journal, Snapchat,
McDonalds, Ring video doorbells, Venmo, Hulu, Signal, various banks
and government sites here in the U.S. and in other countries -- very,
very long list.
And indeed it turns out that this was all the fault of one company:
Amazon. And you might quite reasonably have been thinking to yourself,
well why would all those sites be messed up due to Amazon? And the
answer is THE CLOUD.
Yep, over the years more and more firms, government agencies, other
organizations and so on have moved some or all of the information
technology that they use from their own owned and operated systems to
various Big Tech cloud services providers -- and in an increasing
number of cases organizations and firms never had their own computing
server facilities in the first place and have operated from these
cloud services from day one.
And these services provide various advantages especially in terms of
being able to quickly scale up when more capacity is needed and -- in
theory anyway -- being very reliable. But as we see, theory and
practice can be very different things indeed, and when these cloud
services fail the results can be very negative, very dramatic, and
very widespread.
The big three cloud services providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS)
reportedly with about 30% of the global market, Microsoft Azure with
about 20%, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with about 13%. So between
them a bit more than 60%. The remainder is filled by various Chinese
based services and a variety of smaller services here in the U.S. and
elsewhere.
In the case of this particular Amazon AWS outage the problem
apparently originated in their us-east-1 region which is in a data
center in Virginia, starting a bit after 3 AM eastern and mostly
apparently restored by about 5:30 AM eastern. Eventually Amazon may
publish details on the outage, but reports are that the outage was
triggered by a DNS -- Domain Name System -- related failure.
There's an old saying in the Internet tech world that when there's a
widespread problem "It's ALWAYS the DNS". Well, in reality of course
it's not always the DNS, but yeah, often it IS the DNS. The Domain
Name System is the widely distributed and frankly rather rickety
mechanism used to map site names to the Internet site numeric
addresses that are actually used to establish communications between
sites and users. And when the DNS fails for any number of reasons it's
bad news that can cause all sorts of problems very quickly.
If it seems to you that centralization of so many sites running mostly
on the resources of a handful of cloud providers seems risky
irrespective of the reliability promises made by those cloud services,
you're not alone. In fact, some firms, organizations, and agencies
that originally moved to cloud services have been moving toward
migrating some or all of their IT operations back to self-owned
computing resources due to exactly these kinds of concerns. And it
doesn't take rocket science to see the logic in this.
Millions of websites are hosted by these cloud providers, and
especially by those Big Tech Big Three: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
And note also that these are all companies investing heavily in AI,
firms who could potentially be financially destabilized if the AI
bubble dramatically bursts as many observers predict is only a matter
of time.
Not putting all your eggs in one basket has long been a warning. It
applies even more today with websites, where a lot of sites could end
up with egg on their faces if they don't heed that warning -- and all
of us who depend on those websites could end up being the even bigger
losers.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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