Comment / 'Digital Suez' moment – how the AWS outage became logistics' new chokepoint

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The global supply chain is now acutely familiar with the image of a single point of failure: the Ever Given, lodged diagonally across the Suez Canal, halting an estimated $9.6 billion in trade per day in 2021.

Today’s major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) represents the digital incarnation of that same phenomenon. Just as the 400-metre-long vessel blocked a critical physical artery, the failure in AWS’s US-EAST-1* data center region clogged the digital canals upon which modern logistics depends.

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