Expert warns global internet blackouts to happen more often as half of web wiped out
In just a matter of weeks, the internet has suffered not one or two, but three major outages, causing many of the world's most used websites to stop working, leading to mass disruption.
Last month, Amazon's web services platform AWS went down, causing a huge blackout for sites like Snapchat, Roblox, HMRC, Amazon, Canva and many more. And just over a week later, Microsoft's Azure cloud platform suffered a similar fate, impacting Minecraft, Xbox and Asda Online to name but a few.
Fast forward to yesterday (18 November), and yet another cloud platform has fallen foul of the dreaded internet blackout as Cloudflare went down, impacting sites like ChatGPT, X, IKEA and bet365.
In all three of these major incidents, it has bee the cloud hosts, which together underpin almost the entirety of modern internet, that have gone down, taking thousands of websites down with them.
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These outages have highlighted the fragility of having so many sites relying on singular platforms, and one expert has warned these kind of events are only going to start happening more frequently.
"Although outages are not uncommon, a global 'completely down and out' outage like this is absolutely, highly unusual, and there is no doubt that this has a wide-reaching impact worldwide for businesses and their users," explained Lee Skillen, CTO of software artefact management platform Cloudsmith.
He told the Independent: "Modern infrastructure is built on deeply interconnected systems; the more we optimise for scale, the more challenging it becomes to pinpoint how one failure cascades into another. Will this happen more frequently? The short answer is yes. Expect things to fail."
Skillen went on to say these failures can range from 'mild and short lived' to 'rare and catastrophic', but noted the one thing they all share in common, 'inevitability'.
"Every service with real users will eventually get hit by something; sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly," he added. "The greater the magnitude, the greater the possibility."
Skillen said that while yesterday was Cloudflare, tomorrow it will be another provider, or even possibly a cloud CDN, which is a network of servers that caches content closer to users to improve website performance.
"Each is a reminder of how architectural choices ripple outward, exposing an implicit 'supply' chain," he concluded.
"This is why critical infrastructure providers know they’ve got a difficult but important job to do, and invest millions in ensuring that it doesn’t happen."
Topics: Technology
Emma Rosemurgey