The AWS outage reveals the web's massive centralization problem

"U.K. banks and government tech systems going down. University students in Australia struggling to complete their coursework. Homes across Europe losing access to their Ring doorbells. While you were sleeping, large parts of the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based internet went offline around the world. According to the AWS outage monitor, the problem stemmed from a misconfiguration of Domain Name System (DNS) resolution within the company's cloud infrastructure."

"The outage highlightsjust how much the web's day-to-day functionality relies on the the existence of too few companies. AWS controls around a third of the market; Microsoft, through its Azure cloud service, and Google hold around another third. They are some of a handful of companies that dominate the market -and do so because of their ordinary success and smooth running of cloud infrastructure services."

""The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service-AWS-without planning for redundancy," says Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's department of computer science. It means that in the rare event of an outage from those key infrastructure providers, we see catastrophic consequences across different sectors, from gaming to government."

Major online services and public systems experienced widespread outages when large parts of the AWS-based internet went offline due to a DNS resolution misconfiguration. The outage disrupted banking systems, government tech platforms, university coursework, gaming, and consumer devices like Ring doorbells, and was resolved within about three hours. AWS controls roughly a third of cloud market share, with Microsoft Azure and Google accounting for much of the remainder, creating high concentration of critical infrastructure. Heavy reliance on a few cloud providers reduces redundancy and creates single points of failure. In such rare outages, multiple sectors face simultaneous catastrophic consequences.

Read at Fast Company