The widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage which shut down the digital services dozens of major organisations has highlighted the danger of the UK’s reliance on a handful of major cloud providers, a legal expert has warned.
Services from firms including Wise, Halifax and Lloyds as well as government organisations such as HMRC, were massively disrupted on Monday morning after a DNS issue at AWS.
The scale of the disruption has proven how vulnerable UK institutions can be when entrusting their digital services to a single cloud provider, according to Tim Wright, technology partner at law firm Fladgate.
Wright warned of the “growing systemic risk from heavy national and sectoral reliance on a small number of hyperscale cloud providers”.
The lawyer noted that, as bad as the disruption on Monday has been, it paints a potentially worse picture for the near future as services increasingly run from the same cloud provider.
“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.”
