AWS Outage: A Proprietary Bottleneck in a System Meant to Be Free

Yesterday’s AWS outage, which lasted more than 3.5 hours, wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a reminder of how far we’ve drifted from the Internet’s original proper implementation of a decentralized network. A consolidated DNS service failure in AWS’s US EAST 1 region triggered a cascade of disruptions across major services: Snapchat, Venmo, Signal, Slack, Coinbase, Fortnite, Roblox, Canva, and even impacted LaGuardia airport kiosks. For over three hours, millions were affected and were digitally stranded because of centralization into a single vendor was chosen over decentralization which often includes redundancy.

CNN’s Breakdown: Why It Was So Widespread

As CNN pointed out: AWS isn’t just a hosting provider, it’s (inappropriately) become the central backbone of the modern web. When something as basic as DNS fails, it doesn’t just crash one app, it knocks out entire websites and all related apps.

“DNS is basically the internet’s address book. It translates simple names like amazon.com into the numbers computers use to find each other. When that system breaks, nothing can connect.” — CNN article.

And that’s the real issue: They control data. The outage happened because one of Amazon’s internal systems couldn’t route domain names as DNS intended, leaving millions locked out. It wasn’t just a technical glitch, it was a reminder that we’ve handed the keys of the internet to a few massive corporations.

When one of them stumbles, the whole system shakes.

From Decentralization to Dependency

The internet was born as a decentralized network, designed to be resilient, open, and interoperable. Its architecture was built to survive outages, route around failures, and empower users. But today, we’ve traded that resilience for convenience, and handed control to a handful of cloud monopolies. As we have pointed out numerous times, this is about convenience and control.

AWS represents a proprietary single point of failure. Its closed infrastructure, opaque operations, and dominance over critical services mean that when it stumbles, our digital lives are affected. This centralization is not how the Internet is meant to work.

The Purism Perspective: Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty

At Purism, we see a better way forward, one that is built on user control, decentralization, and true independence. Instead of relying on massive, centralized cloud providers: we can build systems that are distributed, open, and resilient. This outage is a reminder of what’s possible to avoid when we return to the Internet’s original vision: freedom through decentralization.

Cloud Feudalism vs. User Sovereignty: If your apps are thin clients to AWS, you don’t own your data or your uptime. You’re a tenant in Amazon’s empire.
Resilience Through Decentralization: A Librem 5 running PureOS doesn’t grind to a halt because a Virginia data center is down. Local-first apps, peer-to-peer protocols, and user-controlled infrastructure keep you connected.
Rights Shouldn’t Depend on Uptime: If a corporate outage can silence speech, halt commerce, and disrupt travel, then our digital rights are contingent on Amazon’s uptime.
Strategic Takeaway: “The cloud” is just someone else’s computer. When that someone is a monopoly, the entire digital commons becomes brittle. Purism builds distributed, user-sovereign technology that doesn’t collapse in lockstep.

What Comes Next?

This outage will fade from headlines, but the structural danger remains. The question isn’t whether AWS will fail again, it’s whether we will be prepared. Whether we’ll keep building our digital lives on a proprietary bottleneck.

Purism’s answer is clear: decentralize, localize, and empower users to own their digital lives, just as the internet is intended.

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