Published: October 20, 2025 at 2:28 pm
The AWS outage doesn’t appear to be a cyber attack but a glitch – similar to last year’s CrowdStrike outage. The impact is similar and exposes a critical single point of failure. If a comparable vulnerability were deliberately targeted by malicious actors, the damage would be far worse.
The deeper issue is tech monoculture. We are building global infrastructure with very little diversity in platforms or providers. That’s why we are seeing systemic failures. It’s like agricultural monoculture – when everything relies on a single strain, one disease can wipe out entire plantations, because they all have the same genetics.
We need to diversify our technology infrastructure. Customers can design redundancy (i.e., systems that come online when something goes wrong) using on-premise failover or alternative providers. However, this can also be achieved by the providers themselves, such as by developing different competing infrastructures within their ecosystems.
This incident will likely be resolved quickly. However, unless we rethink the architecture (that is, we decentralise and diversify), we should expect more outages of this scale, whether from glitches or targeted attacks.