Monday’s Amazon Web Services outage rippled across daily life, knocking major sites offline and interrupting everything from banking and government logins to Duolingo streaks. The disruption rekindled UK concerns over reliance on a few US cloud giants after services including Lloyds Bank and HMRC were hit. Experts pointed to “nested dependencies” and concentrated risk, even as economies of scale keep firms tied to hyperscalers. The CMA says the market isn’t working well and is examining whether to designate Amazon and Microsoft with strategic status. Advocates urge interoperable, multi-cloud resilience, while the government says it’s engaging AWS and diversifying providers.

Prepared by Jonathan Pierce and reviewed by editorial team.