A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that brought down the digital operations of dozens of major organisations has underscored the growing risks of the UK’s dependence on a small group of dominant cloud providers, a legal expert has cautioned.
The disruption, which stemmed from a DNS issue at AWS, affected a wide range of services on Monday morning — including those of Wise, Halifax, Lloyds, and government departments such as HMRC.
According to Tim Wright, technology partner at law firm Fladgate, the incident has exposed how vulnerable UK institutions are when relying heavily on a single cloud infrastructure provider.
Wright warned of a “growing systemic risk” linked to the nation’s and key sectors’ dependence on a limited number of hyperscale cloud providers.
He added that while Monday’s outage caused significant disruption, it also highlights a more concerning trend — as more organisations consolidate their digital operations with the same few cloud providers, the potential impact of future outages could be far more severe.
“As AI adoption deepens, and vast model training and data‑governance systems increasingly run on a handful of platforms like AWS, today’s event is a reminder that resiliency is not purely a technical parameter but a regulatory and contractual one,” said Wright.
“Firms must reassess their agreements with specific focus on cloud exit, redundancy and incident‑notification contractual clauses through that lens.”
