Amazon Web Services failed on Monday

On Monday, Amazon Web Services failed, reminding the world of the fragility of the Internet and the global economy. The outage at the world’s largest cloud computing provider temporarily crippled thousands of services from some of the biggest companies on earth, such as Venmo, WhatsApp and Zoom, affecting more than 11 million people. The experience was a stark reminder that the entire technical backbone of the Internet consists of just three providers: Amazon, Google and Microsoft. In his 1999 article “America’s Achilles’ Heel,” Gerald Flurry highlighted how computer dependence is creating potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities.