The Consequences of The AWS Outage: In Conversation with Dr. Jamie Woodcock

Server Racks on Data Centre by Brett Styles. Source: Pexels.

On October 20th, the world saw one of the most significant global outages of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in recent memory.AWS, Amazon's cloud computing division is a fee-based service that millions of companies use to gain access to Amazon's already existing hardware and data centre infrastructure.

Used as an industry standard from the smallest startups to some of the largest tech corporations in the world, AWS accounted for approximately 58% of Amazon's total profit in 2024, eclipsing the retail arm of the business. In a 2020 report, the RAND corporation cited AWS as one of the most systematically important companies to the US economy. That importance was only made clearer with this most recent outage.

The October incident was the first significant global outage since 2012, resulting in Amazon's own massive e-commerce site being down along with other influential online services.

Canvas, one of the largest learning management systems owned and operated by Infrastructure, an educational technology company was taken down for the duration of the outage. In 2020 Canvas was used by over 4,000 educational institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, and all the Ivy League Universities. The 12 hours in which Canvas was non-operational resulted in significant educational delays across thousands of academic institutions.

Among one of the most notable services impacted during the global outage was Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange service in the US and the world's biggest holder of bitcoin. Users were unable to buy and sell cryptocurrency throughout the outage with other core functions of the platforms being disabled as well. Mehdi Daoudi, the CEO of Catchpoint – a firm that monitors internet performance – told CNN that the total financial loss of the disruption is projected to be in the millions.

KBR spoke with Dr. Jamie Woodcock, a senior lecturer in Digital Economy at King’s about the outage, alternative futures, and its implications for the global economy and for consumers. 

When asked why AWS is not the front facing side of Amazon’s business Dr. Woodcock reflected on its role in the economy.

“Most consumers never have a reason to know what Amazon Web Service is or what it does, because it's primarily business to business. And I think a lot of people would be shocked to find out how much runs on AWS. …we only ever really see the effects of it when it goes down. And it sends this ripple across the internet with things shutting down.”

In our conversation, Dr. Woodcock reflected on the potential this outage has to make general consumers more aware of AWS’ role in the economy.

“It's not clear to me that when people talk about AWS and DNS issues and outages, that this is necessarily something that's easy for people to understand. …we're not often taught about how the infrastructure of the internet works. We're often taught that it's a kind of open space. But the reality is increasingly, it's becoming centralised around big tech. And I think the outages show people that there's a problem, but not necessarily why that problem exists or what to do about it.”

The dominance of big tech in internet infrastructure has received widespread criticism in the past. Dr. Woodcock suggests that we need to rethink the way we see the internet and its control.

“We treat the internet and access the internet as a utility, much like water or the railways. But the reality is it's not organised like a utility. It's organised through private monopolies. Historically governments used to think that utilities should be nationalised, and they should be regulated. I would hope that these outages show that actually we should treat the backbone of the internet as a national, as an international utility, and it should be highly regulated. It shouldn't be open only to those who pay… this is a way of thinking about what democratizing access to the internet looks like.”

It is often difficult to imagine divergent dynamics to already influential systems in the global economy. But Dr. Woodcock thinks giving consideration to alternatives is still worthwhile.

“This is the challenge, right, that part of what AWS provides is this backbone, but then increasingly, we're seeing the growth of these huge server farms not to provide critical infrastructure, but as part of the rush towards artificial intelligence investment… I don'tknow if you saw the scale of Meta's new... investment, one of the biggest raisings of money through bonds in history to build a server farm the size of Manhattan. That kind of technology could be being used for something different. Instead, it's being used to compete around AI. And I think that poses questions about where we want investment to go. I don't want it to go towards more server farms. It should be going towards housing, education, you know, food, healthcare, these sorts of things.”

With the suggestion of nationalisation KBR asked Dr. Woodcock about the potential difficulties and dangers that could come with nationalisation of web services.

“This has always been one of the challenges of international governance. We don't have effective mechanisms to think about what happens when competition between countries impinges on that. And I think we're already in a place where national competition has meant the creation of walled, access to the internet in some countries and not in others. I think that nationalisation is important because it's also about bringing things under democratic control. The risk, of course, is authoritarian governments can then use that control to do quite different things with the technology.”

Currently AWS is rivaled by Google and Microsoft's competing cloud services, with Amazon having the largest market share of the three. Additionally, Amazon's Chinese counterpart Alibaba has a fee-based cloud service of its own. Without any current alternatives to big tech present, the most recent outage of AWS serves as a reminder of the fragile nature of the global economy and reliance of digital infrastructure on a small number of corporate-giants.