The spotlight has once again been shone on the prominent role played by a small number of cloud computing providers after an outage suffered by Microsoft's Azure platform
The outage began on Wednesday and was eventually resolved but not before a number of high-profile brands reported problems with their online services and apps.
The affected companies included airlines, gaming companies and retail brands. While the financial services sector remained relatively unscathed, difficulties were reported at NatWest, according to DownDetector, the independent agency that monitors outages.
The issue involved a DNS issue that affected Azure Front Door, Microsoft's cloud-based delivery content system.
The outage came just days after AWS, the cloud provider with the biggest market share, suffered a similar problem that caused more widespread disruption to online services, including several banks and financial and government organisations.
Consequently, attention has turned to the dependency on a heavily concentrated number of cloud providers. Microsoft Azure and AWS jointly account for more than half (55%) of the cloud compputing market with AWS the dominant player with a 32% share.
Following the AWS outage, the UK government announced it would publish a plan for handling future outages. Minister for digital government and data, Ian Murray, stated that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology would "set out a clear approach" to dealing with cybersecurity incidents and outages and publish a plan before the end of the year.
Various UK regulators have raised the issue of vulnerabilities around cloud platforms before. In 2022, the Prudential Regulatory Authority stated it was looking at the operational resilience of Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
And in July, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority concluded a two-year investigation into Microsoft and AWS's duopoly in the UK cloud market, stating that "competition isn't working well".
Advocacy group, the Open Cloud Coalition, is now calling on the CMA to act. "The widespread disruption caused by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage underscores the critical importance of a competitive and diversified cloud infrastructure in the UK," stated senior adviser Nicky Stewart.
"As this incident shows, major platforms including banks, government services, and global apps, can be brought to a standstill when resilience isn’t built into the system," stated Stewart.
"The CMA has already found that the UK cloud market is fundamentally broken, which costs consumers and taxpayers £500 million every year. Now, the CMA’s Digital Markets Unit must step up and act."