Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is the largest cloud provider in the United Kingdom. It holds between 40 and 50% of the market for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and its technology underpins the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence and a wide range of public utilities and private companies. When there’s an outage, therefore, the effect is profound. And that’s just what happened on October 20. AWS went down .

But it didn’t just happen in the U.K. It happened everywhere. And across Europe, in the hours that AWS was down, airports, banks, hospitals, media outlets and government services were disrupted. Some went completely offline. The incident showed how dependent we’ve become on a handful of overseas technology providers. This goes beyond cloud computing: it extends across the dig

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