Amazon AWS Outage Highlights Vulnerabilities of Cloud Computing
An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing platform, has caused significant disruptions across the internet. The incident, which occurred on October 20, 2025, affected thousands of organizations, including banks, software platforms like Xero, and social media services such as Snapchat. The outage was traced to a malfunction at one of AWS’s data centers in Northern Virginia, USA. While AWS reported fixing the issue, some users continued to experience disruptions.
Cloud computing, which allows companies to rent IT infrastructure rather than own it, has become central to modern business. This model, offering pay-as-you-go services, has made IT more accessible, and today over 94% of businesses use cloud services in some form. However, the latest AWS outage underscores the risks of relying too heavily on a few dominant providers. AWS holds a 30% share of the global cloud market, followed by Microsoft Azure (20%) and Google Cloud (13%). All three have experienced significant outages in recent years, raising concerns about the vulnerabilities of centralized systems.
The dominance of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud creates a single point of failure. A single error in these centralized systems can disrupt vast portions of the internet, as demonstrated by the AWS outage. Additionally, businesses often face challenges in switching providers due to “vendor lock-in,” where complex data architectures and high costs make migration difficult. This dependence on a few players also raises concerns over geopolitical risks, as US-based companies control vast amounts of global data, subject to US laws and regulations.
To mitigate these risks, experts recommend adopting a multi-cloud approach, where companies use multiple providers to avoid dependence on a single service. Combining this with edge computing—where data is processed and stored on local servers instead of centralized data centers—can enhance resilience, speed, and compliance with data sovereignty laws.
Jongkil Jay Jeong, Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne, emphasizes the need for businesses to decentralize their IT infrastructure to reduce vulnerabilities and improve system resilience.
