This isn\u2019t the first outage of its kind, but as more data \u2014 and eyeballs \u2014 migrate online, the stakes rise. When Amazon\u2019s cloud offering stumbled briefly in 2017, due to an engineer\u2019s typo<\/a>, it was a business with $20bn of annual revenue; today Amazon Web Services makes almost $130bn, according to analyst estimates gathered by LSEG, and is growing by about 20 per cent a year.<\/p>\n On the face of it, such hiccups bolster the case for contingency planning. No sensible business puts all of its eggs in one basket. Still, diversification isn\u2019t simple. Cloud customers have multiple ways of spreading risk: duplicating data across different servers, sites and geographies. But each brings costs. For some Amazon<\/a> customers, even hosting data outside the US didn\u2019t help: certain critical functions such as \u201cidentity management\u201d updates still depend on the eastern US, creating a single point of failure.<\/p>\n A more sturdy option is so-called multi-cloud computing, where data is shared between more than one cloud provider, from big players such as Google and Microsoft to smaller upstarts like DigitalOcean and Vultr. Costs climb further, of course; many charge not just for storage but also levy a toll or \u201cegress\u201d fee when data moves through the pipes.<\/p>\n Mini-disasters tend to focus minds, though, and change priorities. Customers often start from the premise that uptime of 99.9 per cent will suffice. But that still leaves the potential for eight hours and 46 minutes of blackout a year. In practice, even \u201cthree nines\u201d of reliability may feel too few. Companies are already spending escalating amounts on cyber security; resilience may deserve more attention, too.<\/p>\n Of course, if the response to potential outages is that companies attempt to build in more slack, then there will be obvious beneficiaries: cloud and data centre providers themselves \u2014 including, to some extent, Amazon. That\u2019s not unhelpful, given builders of computing infrastructure are investing hand over fist. If a bubble is forming, an anxiety-induced increase in corporate tech budgets might keep it inflated a little longer.<\/p>\n![\"Column](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/https:\/\/d6c748xw2pzm8.cloudfront.net\/prod\/519c29f0-adda-11f0-956c-270c8ea96545-standard.png\")
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