Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is the largest cloud provider in the United Kingdom. It holds between 40 and 50% of the market for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and its technology underpins the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence and a wide range of public utilities and private companies. When there’s an outage, therefore, the effect is profound. And that’s just what happened on October 20. AWS went down.

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Victoria Pearson is the co-founder and managing director of the communications consultancy Sonder London.