AWS Cloud Outage Reveals Vendor Concentration Risk

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AWS Cloud Outage Reveals Vendor Concentration Risk

Article Published October 22, 2025

This article originally appeared on TechTarget on October 22, 2025.

By Sean Michael Kerner

Among the original promises of the cloud was the availability of regionally distributed and highly resilient infrastructure for applications.

However, much of the infrastructure is consolidated among just a few providers, with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud controlling a significant portion of the global infrastructure-as-a-service market. This consolidation creates concentrated points of failure, where a single regional outage can affect multiple industries simultaneously.

Betsy Cooper, executive director at Aspen Policy Academy, frames the dynamic concentration in terms of trade-offs. She noted that the internet now relies on a handful of large tech companies for our internet infrastructure.

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