Picture this snapshot of modern life: upon waking up, you ask your Alexa assistant to put on some morning music. After firing up Zoom to make some work calls, you log on to your bank to pay some bills. While you do this, your smartphone lights up with a WhatsApp message from a friend who wants to meet up that evening.
The above tools – used by millions of people across the world every day – were just a few of the many websites, messaging apps, banks and social media platforms hit by this week’s outage of Amazon Web Services. The e-commerce giant’s cloud computing network experienced technical problems in its US-East-1 Region; this affected not only AWS’s global operations but a substantial part of the worldwide internet as well.
People in the UAE felt the effects. Outage-tracking service DownDetector reported messaging platforms such as Snapchat experiencing disruption as did Emirati telecoms companies Du and e&. This abrupt and widespread interruption follows last month’s connection problems caused by damage to internet cables in the Red Sea. Both incidents are potent reminders that when it comes to connectivity in the 21st century, all entities need to have a Plan B.
That the AWS interruption hit a plethora of services across many different regions shows how a handful of companies’ cloud computing networks underpin an oversized section of the global digital economy. Over-relying on networks such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure leaves too many organisations at risk of severe disruption when things go wrong. However, credit must be given to AWS that the situation was swiftly handled, with consistent communication that reduced the level of concern the incident sparked.
The UAE and other Gulf countries are working hard to mitigate the risks posed by sudden outages. There are local AWS services in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, for example, and these offer greater resilience for customers in an entrepreneurial, digital-first economy. Other regions are also upping their game – in 2020, several EU member states began work on the Gaia-X project to build sovereign cloud infrastructure that would reduce the bloc’s reliance on foreign-hosted networks.
However, many countries are not as forward thinking. Given the damaging and widespread effects that a cloud computing collapse can have, more governments might want to rework their relationships with powerful tech companies. Listing such foreign tech providers as critical third-party partners would require of them more oversight and transparency. When it comes to the digital infrastructure that enables banking, transport, healthcare and government portals to function smoothly, there is little room for complacency.
Tech giants have great power and great responsibility. Too many lives and livelihoods are connected and supported by cloud computing services for anything less than a full account of what went wrong and what steps are going to be taken to avoid a repeat in the future.
In short, because technology is so woven into our lives, when it comes to a robust and reliable internet, it cannot be business as usual. AWS may have moved swiftly to restore its services but given the criticality of the incident and of the role companies like Amazon play, there are many questions that need to be addressed.
