Monday's internet outage, while supremely annoying and expensive and scary for what it says about the vulnerabilities of the centralized internet, ultimately stemmed from an oopsie that Amazon Web Services was able to sort out within a few hours.
A year ago, a much bigger and much more annoying glitch paralyzed businesses around the globe when a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike inadvertently ran a faulty software update that triggered the biggest computer outage in history. That was a disaster that grounded planes, throttled 911 services, knocked hospitals offline and cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses.
And yet that, too, was ultimately the result of some benign error — a one-off mistake that a company was quick to identify and fix.
There are reasons to suspect future outages (and there will be future outages) may not be so easy to fix.
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For one, bad actors looking to exploit those weak links in the internet's infrastructure can do a lot more damage than what we saw with AWS or CrowdStrike, security experts told me last year.
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And, as my colleague Clare Duffy writes today, the fallout will only intensify if artificial intelligence becomes as central to the global economy as tech companies say it will.
Here's Clare:
It may be a hypothetical scenario today, but the tech industry is promising a rapid shift toward AI “agents” doing more work on behalf of humans in the near future – and that could make businesses, schools, hospitals and financial institutions even more reliant on cloud-based services.
Just three companies — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — service around 70% of the global cloud services market, she notes.
Data center outages could happen more frequently since AI models are so power-hungry. And while there's plenty of debate over how transformative AI will ultimately be to the workplace, some tasks, especially among tech companies, are already being offloaded to bots.
“If something goes wrong and you don’t have that human intelligence that’s up to speed,” Emarketer senior analyst Jacob Bourne said, “then we’re really offloading all of these critical tasks to AI and putting a lot of trust in the technology.”
Outages are almost certainly going to keep happening, but we may not be doomed by them. As Clare notes, the AI frenzy is opening the market a bit to smaller cloud computing competitors like Oracle and CoreWeave, which have been gaining market share. And many companies are beginning to lean on multiple cloud providers to create a backstop in the case of a glitch or cyberattack.
And in theory, AI itself could help sniff out coding flaws and prevent outages — if companies actually invest in those capabilities as much as, say, social media slop generators and exotic virtual companions.
“There is a pathway to make AI serve us in the best possible ways,” Bourne said. “It doesn’t necessarily seem like we’re on that pathway, though.”
