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Everything is in “the cloud” now, except the cloud is a real place, and it’s in Northern Virginia. Rows and rows of servers stacked in Amazon-owned warehouses across Ashburn, Haymarket, McNair, Manassas, and Sterling make up a chunk of the infrastructure for the modern internet—equipment as crucial as railway tracks and the electric grid. When a technical issue disrupted operations at those facilities yesterday, it was enough to temporarily crash the internet for users around the world.
The incident marked at least the third time in the past five years that Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia facilities contributed to a widespread internet outage. This time, more than 1,000 sites and services were affected, according to Downdetector, costing companies an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars. Venmo users were locked out of their payments, and international banks experienced major blips in their service. People struggled to book urgent doctor appointments and couldn’t access their Medicare benefits. Snapchat and Reddit were down, as were Instagram and Hulu. Ring paused their doorbell cameras; ChatGPT stopped answering. (Some unfortunate customers of Eight Sleep, which sells AI-powered, temperature-changing mattresses, woke to bright strobe lights or an “absolutely freezing” bed, per testimony on X.) Throughout most of yesterday, the connective tissue of modern life seemed to be under threat—a reminder that the internet is physical, fallible, and heavily reliant on just a few massive companies.
The modern web owes that fragility in part to the cloud. In the pre-cloud age, setting up a website meant buying physical servers, procuring software licenses, and writing foundational code from scratch. This DIY process was both extremely expensive and time-consuming. The basic proposition of the cloud is What if you didn’t have to do any of that? Amazon and its competitors own the servers and prewrite the code so customers don’t have to. When developers lease infrastructure from cloud providers, they get to leave the cumbersome work of maintenance to someone else.
The trade-off is ownership for accessibility, up-front costs for monthly fees—and it has proved extremely attractive. Adoption in the corporate world has been nearly universal. Amazon spearheaded the rush to the cloud in the late 2000s, when it began building the warehouses that now house much of the modern internet. Thanks to that first-mover advantage, it still dominates today: Amazon controls an estimated 30 percent of the global market for cloud computing, while its competitors Microsoft and Google have captured 20 and 13 percent, respectively. Because the actual servers are consolidated under a handful of companies, so are the potential points of failure—not to mention the profits.
Unlike the highways that crisscross the United States, which are built and maintained by government programs, physical data conduits are built and maintained by corporations. The internet is often understood as a free and open resource, but it is controlled by a small group of digital landowners. Last July, a single cybersecurity firm caused an internet-wide meltdown that grounded planes and interrupted financial services around the world. Jonathan Kanter, a former top antitrust regulator in the Biden administration, told me such disruptions help “society understand the magnitude of the power, the magnitude of the reach” that certain companies have. “It doesn’t just affect one commercial interest—it affects the entire country.”
Amazon’s dominance is compounded by the nested structure of the internet: One hyperlink leads to another, which leads to another, which at some point probably leads back to Amazon. An issue with Amazon’s Virginia servers might affect Amazon products globally and any websites that interact with Amazon-backed services; a business that doesn’t rely on Amazon for its services might still be entwined with another business that does.
There are ways out of the centralization trap, but they come with their own problems. Rumble, the streaming service that has become a home for those deplatformed elsewhere, has an AWS alternative of its own. The issue is that Rumble is also linked to inflammatory right-wing causes that could potentially pose reputational risk for major companies looking to use its cloud services. Urbit, another attempt at decentralizing the internet that has generated buzz over the past few years, was founded by the software developer and far-right provocateur Curtis Yarvin, who has openly advocated for an American monarchy. No truly decentralized alternative has so far come close to the scale of AWS, which has dramatically outspent and outperformed its competition. And at this point, new challengers may find it too hard to catch up.
True decentralization is also incredibly difficult to achieve, in cloud computing and beyond. Consider crypto, a form of digital currency originally designed to deliver freedom from the centralized authority of banks and governments. That was the idea, anyway—in practice, this roughly $4 trillion industry is very much beholden to the centralized internet, as well as to Wall Street and Congress. Coinbase, which also went down yesterday amid the AWS outage, is in some ways the antithesis of what crypto’s libertarian thought leaders imagined: Like many other crypto companies, it discovered that centralization is the price of doing business.
Amazon doesn’t publicize the existence of its Virginia data centers, and most customers may not even know they exist. But as the steward of the internet, the company has accrued an enormous amount of influence over our lives: how we access our money, how we seek medical help, even how some people get a good night’s sleep. Tech outages happen—but under our current system, a bad day for Amazon can be a bad day for everyone.
Related:
- The CrowdStrike failure was a warning. (From 2024)
- Crypto’s core values are running headfirst into reality. (From 2022)
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Can Trump contain Israel’s hard right?
- Steve Bannon and the murderers and hitmen who became his “besties”
- No appointments, no nurses, no private insurance needed
Today’s News
- President Donald Trump is asking the Justice Department to pay him about $230 million in compensation for past federal investigations into him, including the Russia probe and Mar-a-Lago search, according to people familiar with the matter; the decision is now in the hands of senior DOJ officials, some of whom are his former lawyers.
- Despite Trump’s suggestion last week that he would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest to discuss ending the war in Ukraine, Trump said he has put off plans to meet with Putin in the near future, claiming he wants to avoid a “wasted meeting.”
- During a visit to Israel today, Vice President J. D. Vance said he was “very optimistic” about the Israel-Hamas cease-fire holding, and some Trump-administration officials privately expressed concern that the agreement could soon break down, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Evening Read
The Parental-Happiness Fallacy
By Stephanie H. Murray
Money is supposed to make life easier. But whether it makes life easier for parents has become a surprisingly contentious question.
A couple of years ago, Pew Research Center published a survey about American parenting that stumbled on a somewhat counterintuitive finding: Lower-income parents were more likely than middle- or higher-income parents to say that they found parenting enjoyable and rewarding “all or most of the time.” The difference was pretty marginal—most parents, regardless of income level, reported finding parenthood enjoyable all or most of the time—but that one data point got people talking. Think pieces proliferated, in which people reflected on why the most disadvantaged parents were “less exhausted and stressed and more rewarded by parenthood,” and why women with more advantages were “the unhappiest mothers,” reporting “the highest levels of dissatisfaction with motherhood.”
More From The Atlantic
- Ghada Abdulfattah: A cease-fire is a moment to count the dead.
- Dear James: My stepson’s biological dad is a terrible human.
- A tool that crushes creativity
Culture Break
Watch. A new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5, argues that in an era of rising authoritarianism, audiences have become too numb to the speculative force of 1984, Shirley Li writes.
Take a look. During Diwali, the five-day festival celebrated by Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs around the world, lamps are lit to celebrate the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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