‘Too big to not fail’: Google outage exposes UK reliance on a handful of cloud providers
Source: The Guardian ·
Our dependence on internet services of a few key tech companies leaves us vulnerable to cloud failures, bugs and more, experts sayIt happened again. A power outage hit a datacentre in London, and things cascaded from there: multiple banking services faltered, court hearings were put on hold and patients reported temporary glitches on the NHS app.The datacentre in question was in Google’s…
From the source
It happened again. A power outage hit a datacentre in London, and things cascaded from there: multiple banking services faltered, court hearings were put on hold and patients reported temporary glitches on the NHS app. The datacentre in question was in Google’s europe-west2-b zone, one of more than a dozen “zones” that the US search giant maintains in Europe to service its clients. The outages – which have affected, according to the website Downdetector, Royal Mail, Revolut, HSBC and Lloyds bank, among others, are so far not of the scale of a similar cascade this time last year, when Amazon Web Services went down for nearly half a day. That outage hit a far bigger node – Amazon’s us-east-1 – in a concentrated region of Virginia, which hosts the greatest density of datacentres on Earth. It saw cascading effects worldwide: taking out the Roblox game and Signal messaging app and causing smart mattresses worldwide to suddenly heat overnight and toast their occupants. Today’s problems…