Much of the Internet has just broken – highlighting once again how vast parts of the web depend on a relatively small number of companies.
The latest outage took down online bank Revolut, leaving its customers unable to even make payments with their cards, as well as HSBC, Lloyds Bank, DPD and others. Customers at each of those companies began to report problems on Tuesday morning.
But the issues appear to be at least partly the result of problems at Google Cloud, the web infrastructure division of the search giant. Though it is not clear that all of the problems were related to that issue, it began around the same time.
Google Cloud confirmed on its status page that "multiple services" were "experiencing issues" in Western Europe. It said that its engineers were investigating the problem and apologised to affected users.
It is just the latest instance of an outage that highlights just how much of the web depends on a relatively small number of companies. Similar incidents have happened in recent years at Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services, for instance.
Each of those companies offer a variety of different services, but they are focused on allowing websites to use infrastructure and software that they require to offer their websites. As such, they have grown dramatically as the web has become bigger, complex and more important.
By centralising that infrastructure within a limited number of companies, they are able to benefit from economies of scale and websites can borrow those tools more cheaply and easily than building them on their own. That offers a variety of benefits, as well as reduced cost: customers can use more servers and other technology at times of high traffic, for instance, and the cloud services can be flexible because they have more resources available.
But that same consolidation means that any outage or technical problems at one of those companies can very swiftly take down large parts of the internet, including websites that would otherwise appear not be connected. That has led to concern about the risks of that power, given that those companies can essentially decide how the internet works, or doesn't.
While the companies that run these services are well known, their cloud operations are relatively obscure compared to their more consumer-facing products. That is somewhat by design: the products are offered as foundations and infrastructure on which other websites can build their services, without anyone visiting them actually knowing.
But the control they have over the internet is vast. Amazon Web Services controls about 30 per cent of the global cloud market, for instance, with Microsoft Azure having about 20 per cent and Google Cloud at about 11 per cent – meaning that they together control about a third of the market.
That is especially true for big and highly-visited websites, which tend both to be more likely to include the kinds of complex operations that cloud services help with, and to rely on them to ensure that they can deal with the large amounts of traffic they generate. Meta, Apple, Spotify and Snap have all been listed as customers of Google Cloud, for instance.
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