In The News
A global outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted companies across every sector – from Delta Air Lines to Facebook and even Fortnite – early on Oct. 20, 2025, following a DNS and internal network load balancer failure in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region.
Here’s My Take
This matters because our digital economy, and increasingly our democracy via online services, depend on a very small number of cloud providers.
This is a textbook case of “too-big to fail” infrastructure. When one cloud provider goes down, vast swathes of the internet go dark. Experts are already warning that the outage proves “internet users are at the mercy of too few providers,” arguing that the handful of companies including AWS now represent a structural point of failure for the modern economy. This outage should not trigger the government to layer more regulation on these cloud giants. We should instead push for diversification and competition in these services. Simply put, policy should not entrench dominant providers as this becomes a forced regulatory shortcut.
Instead, policymakers should make it easier for competitors to emerge by reducing compliance barriers and avoiding regulation that only the biggest firms can meet. At the same time, buyers, companies and governments alike, should treat cloud services like utilities, but built with open competition, not exclusive vertical lock-in. This way outages become less catastrophic.
Outages will happen, but they don’t need to be catastrophic. If we want a resilient, free-market internet – one that doesn’t hinge on the operational health of one giant provider – we need to open up room for many more players, fast.
