How Should We Address the Amazon Web Services Outage? – ProMarket

Roslyn Layton examines the recent Amazon Web Services outage and compares it with last year’s CrowdStrike outage to illustrate differences in scope, responsibility, and systemic impact. She argues that cloud providers should contribute to the Universal Service Fund, ensuring financial contribution to resilience and critical infrastructure for essential services.

Last year, a software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike malfunctioned, causing an outage that affected millions of Microsoft Windows users. I examined whether the market concentration of CrowdStrike’s software worsened the problem and found that, while concentration can create vulnerabilities, it also provides a high level of protection against everyday cyberattacks. The key lesson was that robust safeguards—such as artificial intelligence-driven testing and gradual rollouts—can prevent similar incidents without introducing the risks that deconcentrating the market might entail.

A different…