Consolidation, Again
When one AWS region falters and half the internet stumbles, it tells us something deeper about the state of technology. This is not just a cloud story. It is a consolidation story.
3 min read
Today, US-EAST-1 had a bad morning. A major AWS outage rippled across the web and, for a while, much of the internet looked fragile again.
Apps froze. Payments stalled. Government sites went dark. Smart devices stopped being smart.
It is tempting to treat this as another technical hiccup. But it is really a lesson in consolidation.
AWS said the problem was contained to one region, but that one region happens to underpin an enormous slice of the modern digital world. News outlets from Reuters and The Verge through to The Guardian and Bloomberg reported cascading effects across banks, retailers, games, and public services, all because of a single regional dependency.
This is exactly what I wrote about in my earlier piece on consolidation. We have created a world where the smallest interruption to a single company’s infrastructure becomes a global event. That is not resilience. That is dependence disguised as progress.
The bigger pattern
Consolidation hides inside convenience. It begins with the promise of simplicity, economies of scale, shared platforms, and predictable bills. Then, slowly, it becomes the default: the water we all swim in.
The result is a kind of monoculture that crosses sectors. The same cloud regions, the same software supply chains, the same vendors sitting quietly beneath finance, healthcare, education, entertainment, and government. When one of them sneezes, we all feel the draft.
The illusion of choice
We tell ourselves we are choosing freely, but in reality the market has narrowed to a handful of providers. Even competitors are often running side-by-side inside the same data centres, sharing the same backbone links, and governed by the same private contracts.
When outages like this happen, we see how little true diversity remains. The internet looks plural, but underneath it is increasingly centralised, shaped by a small number of hyperscale operators.
What needs to change
The point is not that everyone should run their own hardware again, although there is still value in that. It is that we should stop celebrating consolidation as progress.
Diversity of infrastructure, ownership, and approach is not inefficiency. It is safety.
Regulators, investors, and boards should be as concerned about digital concentration as they are about financial concentration. Procurement should reward interoperability and federation, not vendor lock-in. And as technologists, we should be a little less proud of having made everything depend on one company’s east coast data centre.
The principle
When we place all of our eggs in one basket, the failure is not the fall. It is the assumption that the basket could never drop.
We keep hearing that the cloud is more reliable than what came before. Statistically, that may be true. Systemically, it is not.
Today’s AWS outage is just a reminder that resilience is not about uptime; it is about diversity. And right now, we have very little of it.
Further reading:
- Reuters coverage - wide impact across major brands and services
- The Verge - consumer platforms affected, timeline of incident
- The Guardian - UK banking and government service disruption
- Bloomberg - AWS statement on cause and recovery