The world’s largest cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has experienced a major outage that has impacted thousands of organizations, including banks, financial software platforms such as Xero, and social media platforms such as Snapchat.

The outage began at roughly 6pm AEDT on Monday. It was caused by a malfunction at one of AWS’ data centers located in Northern Virginia in the United States. AWS says it has fixed the underlying issue but some internet users are still reporting service disruptions.

This incident highlights the vulnerabilities of relying so much on cloud computing—or “the cloud” as it’s often called. But there are ways to mitigate some of the risks.

Renting IT infrastructure

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of diverse IT resources such as computing power, database storage, and applications over the internet. In simple terms, it’s renting (not owning) your own IT infrastructure.

Cloud computing came into prevalence with the dot com boom in the late 1990s, wherein digital tech companies started to deliver software over the internet. As companies such as Amazon matured in their own ability to offer what’s known as “software as a service” over the web, they started to offer others the ability to rent their virtual servers for a cost as well.

This was a lucrative value proposition. Cloud computing enables a pay-as-you-go model similar to a utility bill, rather than the huge upfront investment required to purchase, operate and manage your own data center.

As a result, the latest statistics suggest more than 94% of all enterprises use cloud-based services in some form.

A market dominated by three companies

The global cloud market is dominated by three companies. AWS holds the largest share (roughly 30%). It’s followed by Microsoft Azure (about 20%) and Google Cloud Platform (about 13%).

All three service providers have had recent outages, significantly impacting digital service platforms. For example, in 2024, an issue with third-party software severely impacted Microsoft Azure, causing extensive operational failures for businesses globally.

Google Cloud Platform also experienced a major outage this year due to an internal misconfiguration.

Profound risks

The heavy reliance of the global internet on just a few major providers—AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud—creates profound risks for both businesses and everyday users.

First, this concentration forms a single point of failure. As seen in the latest AWS event, a simple configuration error in one central system can trigger a domino effect that instantly paralyzes vast segments of the internet.

Second, these providers often impose vendor lock-in. Companies find it prohibitively difficult and expensive to switch platforms due to complex data architectures and excessively high fees charged for moving large volumes of data out of the cloud (data egress costs). This effectively traps customers, leaving them hostage to a single vendor’s terms.

Finally, the dominance of US-based cloud service providers introduces geopolitical and regulatory risks. Data stored in these massive systems is subject to US laws and government demands, which can complicate compliance with international data sovereignty regulations such as Australia’s Privacy Act.

Furthermore, these companies hold the power to censor or restrict access to services, giving them control over how firms operate.

The current best practice to mitigate these risks is to adopt a multi-cloud approach that enables you to decentralize. This involves running critical applications across multiple vendors to eliminate the single point of failure.

This approach can be complemented by what’s known as “edge computing“, wherein data storage and processing is moved away from large, central data centers, toward smaller, distributed nodes (such as local servers) that firms can control directly.

The combination of edge computing and a multi-cloud approach enhances resilience, improves speed, and helps companies meet strict data regulatory requirements while avoiding dependence on any single entity.

As the old saying goes, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This holiday season, rather than searching on Google, more Americans will likely be turning to large language models to find gifts, deals, and sales. Retailers could see up to a 520 percent increase in traffic from chatbots and AI search engines this year compared to 2024, according to a recent shopping report from Adobe. OpenAI is already moving to capitalize on the trend: Last week, the ChatGPT maker announced a major partnership with Walmart that will allow users to buy goods directly within the chat window.

As people start relying on chatbots to discover new products, retailers are having to rethink their approach to online marketing. For decades, companies tried to game Google’s search results by using strategies known collectively as search engine optimization, or SEO. Now, in order to get noticed by AI bots, more brands are turning to “generative engine optimization,” or GEO. The cottage industry is expected to be worth nearly $850 million this year, according to one market research estimate.

GEO, in many ways, is less a new invention than the next phase of SEO. Many GEO consultants, in fact, came from the world of SEO. At least some of their old strategies likely still apply since the core goal remains the same: anticipate the questions people will ask and make sure your content appears in the answers. But there’s also growing evidence that chatbots are surfacing different kinds of information than search engines.

Imri Marcus, chief executive of the GEO firm Brandlight, estimates that there used to be about a 70 percent overlap between the top Google links and the sources cited by AI tools. Now, he says, that correlation has fallen below 20 percent.

Search engines often favor wordiness—think of the long blog posts that appear above recipes on cooking websites. But Marcus says that chatbots tend to favor information presented in simple, structured formats, like bulleted lists and FAQ pages. “An FAQ can answer a hundred different questions instead of one article that just says how great your entire brand is,” he says. “You essentially give a hundred different options for the AI engines to choose.”

The things people ask chatbots are often highly specific, so it’s helpful for companies to publish extremely granular information. “No one goes to ChatGPT and asks, ‘Is General Motors a good company?’” says Marcus. Instead, they ask if the Chevy Silverado or the Chevy Blazer has a longer driving range. “Writing more specific content actually will drive much better results because the questions are way more specific.”

Depending on who you are, Instagram might now seem a bit more PG-13. That’s by design.

Meta has rolled out a suite of new content moderation tools on Instagram aimed at addressing concerns that young people are seeing “unsafe content” on the social media platform. Users under the age of 18 will now by default only see content that matches what one would see in a PG-13 movie, based on the Motion Picture Association’s definition.

The rollout of these new tools, which Meta calls the “most significant update to Teen Accounts” since they were introduced in 2024, comes amid renewed concerns that the company’s platforms remain unsafe for young users. This, after social media CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, have been put in the congressional hot seat over the risks their platforms pose to teens.

The question remains: Will making Instagram PG-13 for teen users really protect them?

Ursula Smartt, an associate professor of law at Northeastern University’s London campus, isn’t so sure.

“The changes apply only to teen-specific accounts, which are accounts that teens have created using their truthful birth dates or accounts that Instagram has determined,” Smartt says. “Yet, it is common for teens to lie about their ages online to avoid certain restrictions.”

Age verification laws are already being introduced in a number of countries to avoid this problem. However, the number of people using virtual private networks, or VPNs, has surged in response, Smartt explains.

“Most teenagers know and use VPNs already, which mask their internet traffic and spoof their location,” allowing them to get around age verification laws in a given country, Smartt says.

Given how resourceful teens are in evading rules regardless of whether they’re in the virtual or real world, Instagram’s new rules could actually put more pressure—and responsibility—back on parents.

Anything that minimizes the amount of unsafe content teens don’t want to see on social media is a move in the right direction, according to Rachel Rodgers, an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern who studies the impact of social media on young people. However, these new tools are much more effective as a jumping-off point for educating children about how to engage with social media.

“The more children are having conversations with their parents about what they’re doing on social media and why and how and what this means, the better the outcomes,” Rodgers says.

That’s admittedly a big ask. Most parents barely have enough time to watch along during their children’s screen time, she says, let alone every time their teen hops on Instagram. But the sooner parents can start talking about how to use social media with their children, the better. Those conversations help young people develop critical skills, like how to detect intent behind what people are saying and posting on social media. That’s integral for learning how to then interact with and respond to people online in a healthy way, Rodgers says.

There are options for making the platform even more restrictive, and Rodgers admits it can be tempting for parents to just turn on these settings and let Meta’s designers do their job. It’s much better for parents to approach these new tools collaboratively and make it a conversation.

“That’s when you’re explaining to teens why some content would be restricted,” Rodgers says. “Why would you want them to see it? Why might you not want them to see it?”

Those conversations might reveal something surprising: Parents and their children are more aligned than either might think when it comes to content on social media.

“[Teens are] generally not trying to go view things that we would consider really outside of their age,” Rodgers says. “They’re quite happy to not be pushed too much on that. They find it uncomfortable.”

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.