Outage is ‘extremely significant’ says cybersecurity expert as issues remain
AWS insisted in its latest update that the service is approaching full functionality again, but the incident has some profound lessons to teach, experts have said.
Professor Oli Buckley, an expert in Cyber Security at Loughborough University has said the outage is “extremely significant” as it has exposed just how many key services are reliant on just one provider. He said: “This outage is extremely significant because AWS is a backbone for much of the internet’s infrastructure, it’s a really stark reminder of how many well known services rely on a handful of providers and services themselves.
“For example, CloudFlare had a couple of outages in the last few years that cascaded through the internet making a variety of things unavailable. When a core region of such a big service falters, the knock-on effect is broad, consumer apps, enterprise systems, even banking and national services may feel the impact.
“There’s nothing to suggest this is any kind of attack, in fact it feels like a regular operational outage at the moment. It does serve as an excellent reminder that these things can impact even the biggest tech companies in the world, and contingency planning is really important (even if it’s less sexy and exciting than cyber attacks, espionage and intrigue).
“It’s a reminder that we need to think about resilience, and not just defences; systems still need to be able to recover quickly, communicate clearly and keep the essential services running.”