Blain’s Morning Porridge Oct 21st 2025: Time for a rethink on Tech Resiliency?
“Did someone forget to feed the hamster?”
Western economies are dependent on functional tech. Yesterday’s Amazon outage suggests the resiliency of tech infrastructure is creaking, raising multiple issues about dependency and costs. Could a shift in how companies secure against Tech vulnerabilities see the MAG3 firms at the core of global tech infrastructure hit?
When I opened Linked-in this morning, I was deluged in adverts from Amazon Web Services, telling me all about how they automate, create and reduce costs, while boosting my productivity. No surprise really, the spyware that watches our every keystroke would have picked up I was searching for info on yesterday’s outage. I posted a very rude message in reply.
What I was looking for was some data or narrative to back up for my thesis we might just have suffered the No-See-Um moment that breaks the myth of the West’s all powerful Tech?
We all think global tech is shiny and sparkly. But what if it’s just a couple of hamsters running round a wheel in their cage that keeps it all running? And what happens when one of them decides to take a nap, or Amazon forgets to feed them? (Power for Data centres is just one concern!)
Gosh! Who knew? Global commerce is dependent on three US firms that dominate cloud computing? And the infrastructure behind them is creaking? And that’s happening at time when our systems are under increasing attack.
Yesterday’s Amazon Web Services’ Domain Name System (DNS) outage should be a wake-up moment – could it be the trigger for firms across the globe start to switch to private cloud services? Taking back responsibility? Don’t be surprised if the largest firms with the most to lose in a data meltdown change tack completely in coming months. The consequences for Amazon, Google and MS could prove significant. (Amazon is 30% of the global cloud market – and isn’t it one of the key drivers of its profits?)
In the wake of massive cyber-attacks that have taken out firms like Jaguar Landrover for months, Crowdstrike last year, and the potential for a full chip’n’rare-earths trade war – what should firms be thinking about in terms of their IT resiliency? Does the speed of the AI build out mean the replacement and upgrade of older systems, like the AWS data-centre in North Virginia at the heart of yesterday’s crash, mean the rails of global tech are potentially even more vulnerable than we thought?
No one is admitting how many websites were hit by the AWS outage yesterday – closing down commerce at some of the largest web-firms on the planet. I noticed it on my Substack account – an error message triggered by a crash on Amazon’ database engine. It still unclear how long some will take to recover full functionality – but it hit everything from Airlines, Healthcare, Electric Car Charges, Delivery Services, Coffee Shops, Gaming Sites, Crypto Platforms, Banks, Streaming, Insurance, and taxi-apps. Yet Amazon stock is higher this morning…
What amused me more than anything else was the coverage on US media – it happened early in the morning, so firms were able to swiftly react “minimising the economic damage” according to one host. Not so much fun in Europe, where it hit at the beginning of the business day. It’s yet another example of US Financial Imperialism to file away in the “scores to be settled later” box.
One of the major threats to the West is how conflict could see a massive wave of cyber and infrastructure attacks designed to derail the west’s reliance on cloud based tech. I’m told Elon Musk’s Starlink has also crashed this year. Europe should be thinking long and hard about secure Tech.
One of the businesses hit y’day was Coinbase, the corrupto-exchange. It triggered one any customer to tell the WSJ” “A Crypto-exchange brought down by a centralised cloud? You can’t preach decentralisation and still depend on ASW to stay online!”.
Last year’s Crowdstrike outage is said to have cost firms over $5.4 bln in losses at Fortune 500 firms (that actually seems a low number). It’s likely Amazon will face an even higher bill as companies claim against losses. Interesting question – how are Tech firms ensured against this kind of event? Who will bear the pain? Surprisingly Amazon stock was up yesterday!
Strikes me a massive rethink in data management is not only likely, but underway. Issues like data sovereignty and security, cyber-crime and input vulnerabilities, in addition to the instability of aging tech infrastructure are bound to make firms reconsider their data management and internet protocols. Beats me why anyone would want to run their business AI through a closed weight system..
Anyway, really short of time this morning…
Bill Blain
CEO – Windshift Capital
Author – The Morning Porridge
Partner – Shard Capital
