Hundreds of thousands of people remained unable to access critical services last night how Microsoft Azure unexpectedly went down.
Massive shutdown occurred just nine days after the Amazon Web Services outage stopped “half the Internet.”
Now experts have revealed the alarming reality of the internet shutdown.
Microsoft and Amazon are the world's two largest cloud computing providers.
The vast majority of internet services, including apps, social media platforms and websites, rely on these companies to process their data.
Together, Amazon and Microsoft's vast data centers, known as “hyperscalers,” host more than 60 percent of the world's cloud services.
Therefore, when a problem occurs, its effects are felt by almost everyone around the world.
“We're seeing what 'putting all your eggs in one basket' looks like on a global scale,” warned Colette Mason, artificial intelligence consultant at Clever Clogs AI.
Last night, hundreds of thousands of people lost access to critical services due to an unexpected outage of Microsoft Azure. The massive outage comes just nine days after an Amazon Web Services outage brought “half the internet” to a standstill. Now experts have revealed the alarming reality of the internet shutdown.
When services like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services go down, it causes major problems because of how companies structure cloud computing.
Essentially, cloud computing is when companies or individuals rent IT infrastructure from one of the tech giants.
Instead of incurring the huge costs of building and running their own servers, it is usually cheaper for companies to pay to process data for them.
However, this means that huge parts of the Internet rely on a few centralized “nodes” where the world's data is processed.
“We've come to rely on the three or four big cloud providers because of cost and simplicity,” Patrick Burgess of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, told the Daily Mail.
“They make it possible to deliver new services at a scale that would be difficult for individual organizations to replicate.”
Experts say that the total dominance of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud now creates serious risks.
Dr Saqib Kakvi, from Royal Holloway University, told the Daily Mail: “The majority – around 60 per cent – of companies will rely on the near triopoly of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service that provides servers and data hosts to thousands of companies, including Starbucks, Xbox, Kroger and Costco.
Experts say these problems stem from the fact that the world's cloud computing services are concentrated in huge data centers run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Pictured: Amazon Web Services data center in Ashburn, Virginia.
“This means we put all our eggs in one of three baskets.
“While these companies are leaders in cloud technology, they are not infallible.
“As we have seen twice in the last 10 days, if even one provider has a problem with part of its infrastructure, hundreds or even thousands of services become unavailable, affecting millions of customers around the world.”
Yesterday, from approximately 15:30 GMT, an outage in Microsoft Azure caused more than 105,000 Down Detector outage reports.
The problems affected Microsoft services such as Microsoft 365, Outlook, Xbox Live and Copilot.
However, with so many companies using Microsoft Azure cloud processing, the outage quickly spread to companies like Costco, Starbucks, and data tools like Blackbaud.
According to Microsoft, the issue was caused by what the company called an “unintentional configuration change” in the Azure Front Door content delivery network.
Just nine days earlier, Amazon Web Services went down in an outage that affected more than 2,000 companies and millions of internet users around the world.
The Microsoft outage comes just nine days after Amazon Web Services suffered another major outage, causing disruptions for millions of users.
According to Amazon, the huge outage was caused by a “malfunction” at one of its data centers in Northern Virginia.
While giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure tend to be more reliable than smaller companies, experts say the outages highlight the problems of over-reliance on just a few companies.
The results of the failure of just one firm were huge, but if multiple suppliers had problems at the same time, the results could have been much worse.
Dr Kavi says: “A large number of websites and apps will become unusable, and this could include essential services such as banking, transport and logistics.
“The dependency between the two could result in downtime of days rather than hours, as was the case with recent outages.”
In fact, these three providers are now so deeply integrated into the fabric of the Internet that people can be affected even if they don't rely on cloud computing services.
Professor James Davenport, a computer scientist at the University of Bath, explained to the Daily Mail: “Companies buy services from other companies and very often they don't disclose the source of their reliability.”
Because the Internet is so dependent on a handful of individual firms, this domino effect means that small failures have widespread and often unexpected consequences.
Experts say the huge dependence of Amazon and Microsoft means small mistakes can cause major disruptions to multiple services. During the Amazon Web Services outage this included GOV.UK
Together, Amazon and Microsoft provide about 60 percent of the world's cloud computing. This makes the global Internet extremely vulnerable to power outages if errors occur.
For example, Amazon's web service failure led to problems with electric locks, beds, and even ovens that relied on software connected to the cloud.
Dr Jongkil Jong from the University of Melbourne told the Daily Mail that the failures “highlighted a fundamental vulnerability in the way cloud computing is currently structured”.
“This high degree of dependency means that a problem with one vendor could cripple a huge portion of the Internet,” he added.
Solving this problem is so difficult because the enormous power of these few companies means that they are able to control the market.
While tech giants have cemented their dominance by offering companies favorable terms, there are now concerns that these companies are stifling competition.
Dr. Jeong notes that these services impose “vendor lock-in,” making switching providers prohibitively difficult, expensive, and complex.
For example, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure often charge “data egress costs”—a fee for moving your data from their platform to a new service.
This means that competitors are cut off from the market and cannot compete with larger players.
Because Amazon Web Services is used by so many different services and programs, even companies that don't pay for cloud processing could be disrupted during an outage.
To make matters worse, experts say these firms' near-monopoly encourages them to “run warm”—that is, they don't use more resources than they need.
In July, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said its investigation into the UK cloud services market found it was “not performing very well”.
The regulator recommended using its powers to designate Amazon and Microsoft as having “strategic market status”, which would allow them to demand changes to enhance competition.
Nicky Stewart, senior adviser at the Open Cloud Coalition, told the Daily Mail: “This dependency stifles competition and innovation, while creating a fragile system in which one provider's problem can quickly become everyone's problem.”
“The market is extremely anti-competitive and it is very difficult for competitive cloud service providers to even have a say, let alone have an opportunity, leaving companies with few viable alternatives.
“Europe's cloud sector urgently needs bold regulatory action to break this dependency and restore real competition.”
An Amazon Web Services spokesperson told the Daily Mail: “For nearly 20 years, AWS has maintained a reputation for reliability that surpasses other major cloud providers, and customers choose AWS because we provide the most innovative, secure and scalable services.”
Microsoft declined to comment in response.
