Who Really Runs the Internet?
We think of the internet as a decentralized network, but "the cloud" has changed that. Data is the new oil, and just three companies control the pipelines: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Together, they account for 60% of the global cloud market. They own the cables, the data centers, and the proprietary tools that make switching providers difficult and expensive.
The Internet's "Choke Point" Is in Virginia
All this "cloud" data has to live somewhere. For Amazon, the most critical location is US-EAST-1, a massive cluster of data centers in northern Virginia. This single region is estimated to handle a staggering 70% of the world's internet traffic.
Think of it as the Strait of Hormuz for data—a narrow, critical choke point for global digital commerce. This week's crash was this cluster's third major outage in five years, each one causing a widespread internet meltdown.
More Than a Glitch, It's a Warning
This 15-hour paralysis is more than a technical blip. It's a warning shot. Our entire 21st-century economy—from remote work and banking to hospital systems and government services—is built on a backbone that is dangerously centralized.
This level of dependency creates a massive vulnerability, not just to technical errors, but to cyber-attacks or sabotage. The AWS outage shows that true digital resilience means not having a single point of failure. The debate is no longer about if we should diversify our critical infrastructure, but how quickly we can do it.
Short Summary: Monday's 15-hour Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage wasn't just an inconvenience; it was a stark reminder of how the entire global internet relies on a handful of companies. When AWS went down, thousands of services like Snapchat, Roblox, and Signal went with it, proving our digital world is balanced on a knife's edge.