Brent Ellis, a tech analyst at Forrester, said the episode showed how much consumers relied Amazon for internet access.
“It highlights how concentration risk, a dangerously powerful yet routinely overlooked systemic risk, arises when so many companies across all industries become dependent on a single cloud provider and, more pertinently, a single region covered by that vendor,” he said.
“There’s great appeal to using tech giants but assuming they are too big to fail or inherently resilient is a mistake, with the evidence being the current outage and past ones.”
While the blackout was a record in terms of reports, the disruption was arguably less severe than an IT meltdown last year related to the security company CrowdStrike.
The CrowdStrike bug last summer – which brought airlines, payment systems and train companies to a standstill – led to five million outage reports.
The AWS glitch, which the company blamed on a problem with how sites and apps connect to its database system, affected smart home systems such as Ring security alarms, robot vacuums and a smart bed company.
Eight Sleep, which sells a £3,000 smart mattress that adjusts temperature and tracks people’s sleep, said it had been affected by the outage. Some customers said they were unable to recline their beds because of the AWS crash.
