When Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down globally in October 2025, millions of users were abruptly reminded how invisible yet indispensable cloud technology has become.

From banks and hospitals to airlines and retail platforms, entire sectors slowed or came to a standstill. The disruption followed a separate catastrophe earlier in July 2024, when CrowdStrike’s software update grounded operations around the world.

Different companies. Different causes. Yet both events exposed the same uncomfortable truth: the world’s digital infrastructure, the networks, servers and software that underpin nearly every modern service, is far more fragile than we like to believe.

Technically, these were very different failures, but the similarity lies in how quickly they cascaded. A single error in a single company rippled across global systems that had no direct relationship to that company at all.

The illusion of resilience

For years, cloud providers have marketed themselves as the answer to such fragility. Distributed computing, automated backup, and redundant systems are supposed to keep data and services online even when local components fail. However, the cloud model depends heavily on network connectivity and can introduce latency and other vulnerabilities, that mitigates certain failures, but does not eliminate fragility entirely.

As both the AWS and CrowdStrike incidents show, redundancy on paper doesn’t always mean resilience in practice. Many organisations that rely on AWS for critical services also use AWS for their backup, monitoring or authentication. When a core network fails, so do the fail-over mechanisms designed to prevent downtime. In other words, “diversification” often exists only within the same provider’s ecosystem, a classic case of putting all eggs in one digital........

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