Could Amazon Doom the U.S.?
The United States, and indeed the Western world, has just shown its adversaries its exact weak spot. And who would have thought — it’s Amazon.
Amazon Web Services is the backbone of much of the economy and the government. AWS is a cloud computing platform that enables companies to do a number of things, such as store data and increase their computing power.
Today, AWS underpins a significant portion of global internet infrastructure. Over 90% of Fortune 100 companies use AWS services, and hundreds of Fortune 500 firms rely on AWS for at least part of their operations.
These companies are ones that much of America uses or relies on, like Bank of America, Capital One, Apple, Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, Snapchat, Reddit, Netflix, Disney and more. So, it goes without saying, if you weren’t able to access much of your services during that latest outage, you were not alone.
It is evidently undeniable that AWS provides a valuable service to its customers. And while that service is good for the companies, the increased concentration of companies relying on AWS is a problem for consumers and potentially the U.S. as a whole.
AWS has several major government contracts that represent billions in federal spending, and approximately 7,500 government agencies use its services worldwide. In August of this year, the General Services Administration announced “OneGov,” included in which was $1 billion in direct incentive credits for AWS cloud services, modernization support and training for federal agencies through the end of 2028. In December of 2022, AWS was awarded a $724 million five-year contract to provide the Navy access to AWS commercial cloud environments, AWS GovCloud, AWS Secret Region, and AWS training and certification programs. The CIA made a groundbreaking $600 million deal over a decade ago that brought highly classified systems to the cloud for the first time using AWS.
The U.S. government uses AWS for various essential functions. The Department of Defense, for example, uses AWS for autonomous systems management and real-time battlefield data processing. The CIA and National Security Agency use AWS for classified data storage, processing and sharing across all 18 intelligence agencies. Other federal agencies use AWS for government services, fraud detection, benefits deliveries, health care systems and public safety operations. Other vital entities like energy and utility companies use AWS for managing operations, security and resilience of critical U.S. infrastructure.
There’s no doubt that AWS is providing an extremely beneficial service to the government. In fact, the chief information officer at the CIA stated last year that “had it not been for the partnership with AWS that CIA took over 10 years ago … we would not be here today.”
Yet so many U.S. government agencies’ and major companies’ reliance on the platform, with classified data and critical economic information flowing through it, raises the question, are we creating a single point of failure that any adversarial nation could exploit?
If the recent and past outages are any indication, AWS must defend itself like any nation. Because if it goes down, the government can go down, our national intelligence can go down. And so too can our economy.
The United States and its economy have essentially provided a clear and open target that any adversarial nation can exploit: a private company that powers a substantial share of the world’s cloud infrastructure. And an attack doesn’t need to shut down AWS’s systems for long to disrupt the government and the economy. Some experts estimate just hours of downtime could cost the economy hundreds of millions of dollars due to lost productivity and suspended business activities, in which success is measured in milliseconds. And who knows how effective a well-timed attack could be during a war, be it physical or cyber.
This single point of failure, as cybersecurity experts call it, is a problem that may continue to grow. Cybersecurity experts point out that only three or four cloud computing platforms process much of the world’s online activities, and that attacking any one of them could cause devastating effects.
As it stands, there have been a number of major outages, many of which have come from AWS but some from others as well. This past outage lasted approximately 12 hours due to a system failure in one of AWS’s regions. In June, Google Cloud and Cloudflare, as a result of an overload in Google’s service control infrastructure, impacted a number of major services. In 2024, the infamous CrowdStrike and Microsoft 365 failure caused $5.4 billion in losses and harmed the health care, finance and aviation sectors. AWS also had a three-hour outage in March of 2023, and a seven-hour outage in December of 2021.
The United States, and indeed the Western world, has just shown its adversaries its exact weak spot. And who would have thought — it’s Amazon.
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