The AWS-outage shows just how fragile the modern web has become—and why it’s time to reclaim its decentralized roots.
When one company sneezes, the whole internet catches a cold
On he 20th of October 2025, Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage. A technical failure in its US-East-1 region — an unassuming cluster of data centers in northern Virginia — rippled across the world, bringing down banking apps, streaming services, crypto exchanges, and even parts of government websites in the US.
It wasn’t a cyber-attack, nor a Russian DDoS campaign. It was a DNS automation error that caused internal systems to race and crash. Yet the result was eerily familiar: thousands of sites blinking out simultaneously, like lights connected to a single circuit breaker.
The incident once again exposed an uncomfortable truth: the internet may look vast and interconnected, but in reality, it rests on the shoulders of a few tech behemoths.
From decentralized datacenters to cloud monopoly
When the internet was first conceived—rooted in ARPANET’s Cold-War logic from DARPA — it was meant to survive nuclear war. Its architecture was distributed by design: no single point of failure, no central switchboard to destroy.
Fast forward half a century, and that resilience has quietly eroded. Today, roughly 1/3 of the world’s digital infrastructure depends on AWS alone. Add Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and the number exceeds 2/3.
In theory, the web remains a mesh of networks. In practice, it’s a cloud oligopoly: a few providers hosting everything from Netflix and Slack to entire government systems. Convenience has triumphed over diversity.
The centralization paradox
Ironically, the cloud was marketed as a solution to decentralization problems. Companies no longer needed to maintain their own servers; they could scale instantly, replicate data globally, and focus on innovation instead of infrastructure.But outsourcing infrastructure came with a hidden cost: dependency.
The more startups, companies, and institutions migrated to cloud platforms, the more the internet began to orbit around a handful of hyperscalers. Even supposedly “decentralized” projects—like blockchain applications—often run their nodes, APIs, and analytics layers on AWS servers. So when AWS sneezes, DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, and metaverse worlds cough in unison.
Why this concentration is dangerous
Centralisation isn’t just a philosophical problem—it’s a technical and political one.
- Single points of failure: When one cloud region collapses, millions of services go dark. The 2025 AWS outage proved that redundancy within a single provider is not the same as true decentralization.
- Vendor lock-in: Proprietary APIs and pricing models make switching clouds extremely expensive. Startups grow inside a walled garden, unable to migrate without major rewrites.
- Censorship and control: Centralized clouds can de-platform entire movements or businesses overnight—whether due to legal orders, corporate policy, or geopolitical pressure.
- Economic inequality:The internet’s backbone is increasingly owned by a few trillion-dollar corporations. This concentrates not only data but also profit and influence.As Wired noted after the outage, “One AWS region went down, and suddenly the internet looked smaller than ever.”
The illusion of resilience
Many developers defend their reliance on AWS by citing its redundancy: “We use multiple availability zones.” But that redundancy exists within the same corporate ecosystem. True digital resilience requires diversity of ownership—different providers, geographies, and governance models. Otherwise, redundancy is like putting multiple backups in the same vault: safer, perhaps, but still vulnerable to one locked door.
The original internet protocols assumed autonomy: every network was sovereign, every node replaceable. Today’s web assumes dependency: one account outage, and entire businesses freeze.The result? A system optimised for convenience, not survival.
Reclaiming the web’s decentralised DNA
Decentralization doesn’t mean every user needs a server in their basement. It means restoring plurality—technical, geographic, and institutional.
Some practical steps:
- Hybrid and multi-cloud architecture: distribute workloads across several providers—or combine cloud with self-hosted servers.
- Edge computing and local hosting: empower smaller data centers, community ISPs, or regional infrastructure cooperatives.
- Open protocols and interoperability: ensure that moving from one platform to another doesn’t require a full rebuild.
- Decentralised DNS and storage: systems like IPFS, ENS, or Handshake aim to reduce reliance on corporate DNS and cloud file hosting.
- Policy incentives: governments could reward or subsidise infrastructure diversity, especially for public-interest services.
Decentralization, in this sense, isn’t nostalgia. It’s a strategy for true digital resilience.
But isn’t cloud centralization efficient?
The short answer? Yes — centralization brings efficiency. Big clouds offer scale, redundancy, and security expertise that few small operators can match. But efficiency isn’t the same as sustainability.Think of it like agriculture: industrial farming produces cheap food quickly, but at the cost of soil health & biodiversity. The cloud, too, has become monocultural. If one corporate “crop” fails, the entire ecosystem starves.True resilience lies in diversity — not the illusion of control.
A matter of trust, not just data storage & technology
The deeper issue is trust: When most of the world’s communication, commerce, and data live on servers owned by a handful of corporations, we outsource not only infrastructure but also data sovereignty. A decentralized internet redistributes that trust: between users, developers, and communities. It restores agency. And in an era when digital systems underpin everything we touch in society, from elections to hospitals, that’s not idealism — it’s necessity.
Let’s take the AWS-outage as a warning shot!
If the internet is the nervous system of modern society, then the AWS-outage was a mild stroke. It temporarily paralysed the body but left us conscious enough to reflect. We should treat it as a warning — one that history has given us before. Every major cloud incident (AWS 2021, Google 2022, Cloudflare 2023, and now AWS 2025) exposes the same truth: our digital world is fragile because it is centralised.The next outage might not be so merciful.
A call to rebuild with us?
Re-decentralizing the web won’t happen overnight.It requires collaboration between technologists, policymakers, citizens & tech enthousiasts like us! It requires incentives for diversity, interoperability, and self-reliance. But the goal is clear: to make the internet behave again like what it was meant to be—a network of networks, not a network of monopolies.
Are you up for that challenge together with us? Need any help analyzing you tech stack and evolving to a decentralized future? Don’t hesitate to contact us