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Technology · 21 October 2025

Why One Cloud Outage Can Take the Internet Down With It

Why One Cloud Outage Can Take the Internet Down With It

Think of the cloud as the Internet’s power grid — vast data centres run by Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. Most apps rent their “digital electricity” from these shared hubs instead of running their own servers. When one hub — say, AWS’s US-East-1 region — stumbles, every app relying on it goes dark together. The cause can be mundane: a failed update, fibre break, or overload. The insight? The Internet isn’t truly global — it’s concentrated in a few powerful clouds.

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