The internet can seem like an endless sea of different websites and apps. But it increasingly depends on a small cluster of giant companies to keep it running.
In recent years, internet businesses have outsourced much of their IT operations to cloud computing providers Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Today, services from online banking to messaging apps rely on the cloud, as does the Government’s login system that is soon to power Labour’s digital ID scheme.
It is seen as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Instead of every company having to buy their own servers and networking equipment, the likes of Amazon build cavernous data centres, renting out space and providing tech support.
Smaller companies avoid the upfront cost of buying IT equipment, while the so-called hyperscalers which run cloud services see a handsome return on their investment. AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, is the biggest of these, and almost twice as profitable as its retail division.
Cloud computing has become a utility. And, like electricity or water, it is only when something goes wrong that questions are asked.
On Monday morning, dozens of services including Lloyds Bank, HMRC and the video game Fortnite were knocked offline by a technical error related to Amazon’s cloud servers on the US east coast.
Users of Ring doorbells and security systems found they were unable to activate emergency alarms. People using the messaging app Snapchat found that their friend lists had been deleted. Language learners on Duolingo fretted that their precious learning streaks would be reset.
More than 1,000 services were affected, according to Down Detector, which monitors website crashes.
Amazon provided regular updates on the source of the problem – a technical glitch related to how web services accessed information from databases – and said it had been resolved within a few hours.
But the episode shone a light on how much of the internet relies on a single point of failure, and led to questions about handing over responsibility to a small club of cloud providers.
AWS accounts for more than a third of the $172bn (£128bn) cloud infrastructure market, according to Gartner, making it the single biggest provider. The two biggest providers, Amazon and Microsoft, control more than 60pc of spending, with Google a distant third.
The next two biggest players are the Chinese companies Alibaba and Huawei, which few Western firms rely on, making the market effectively a three-way fight.
“The outage highlights how deeply the internet depends on a few dominant cloud providers,” said Grace Harmon, an analyst at eMarketer.
