Don't look down

Yesterday, Google Cloud suffered a major outage in their europe-west-2 data centre in London. Banks, payment services and public-sector websites across the UK and Europe went dark for hours. Many other websites got dragged down with them because they load fonts from Google on every page view (side note: host your own fonts, it’s easy!).

This was an accident, but think about what it showed us: a fault at a single provider was enough to interfere with card payments, banking, government services, and more. Now imagine this disruption but as a decision deliberately made in Washington.

This isn’t a tinfoil-hat scenario any more. Individual organisations have already been targeted and there have recently been threats of “devastating” retaliation if Europe limits Starlink spectrum access.

Yesterday’s burp was a small preview of what dependence on a single AND foreign provider can feel like. For a few hours, many of us found out how much of our business and daily lives run on infrastructure we don’t own or control.

How exposed are you?

Colin