The AWS Outage Reminds Us: Infrastructure Dependency Is Everyone's Problem
The recent AWS outage in the US-East-1 region disrupted hundreds of companies and generated millions of Downdetector reports. Banks, airlines, government websites, and major platforms like Coinbase and Zoom all went dark.
The financial impact could reach billions. The reputational damage is already done.
But here's what the post-mortems will miss: this isn't about AWS being unreliable. AWS is one of the most robust infrastructures available. The issue is centralised dependency itself.
The Real Risk Isn't the Platform
We've seen this pattern before. When Business Catalyst shut down, agencies scrambled to migrate hundreds of client sites. When platforms change direction, businesses face costly rebuilds.
The conversation always focuses on the wrong thing. People debate open source versus proprietary, or which cloud provider is "best". But platform change itself is the problem, regardless of who owns the code.
Vendor lock-in exists whether you're on AWS, Azure, or self-hosting on open source. The lock-in comes from architectural decisions, data structures, and integration patterns you build over time.
What Agencies Can Actually Control
You can't eliminate infrastructure risk. But you can reduce your exposure.
Start with architecture. API-first design means your front-end customer experience isn't tightly coupled to your infrastructure. When something fails, you have options.
Maintain data access. Full control over your data and code means you can move if needed. Not theoretical portability, actual access to everything.
Build for flexibility from day one. The time to think about migration is before you need it, when you're choosing how to structure your solutions.
The Hybrid Approach
We built Siteglide on platformOS specifically to address this. Enterprise-grade infrastructure with the flexibility agencies need. No glass ceilings, minimal vendor lock-in, but also no security and maintenance burden of pure open source.
While platformOS handles infrastructure, we focus on building better tools for agencies. When infrastructure issues arise, they're managed at scale by specialists.
This isn't about being immune to outages. It's about having control when things go wrong.
Moving Forward
The AWS outage will fade from headlines. Services will stabilise. But the underlying dependency risk remains for everyone building on centralised infrastructure.
For digital agencies serving SMEs, this matters more than ever. Your clients trust you to build solutions that work. When major platforms go down, that trust gets tested.
The answer isn't abandoning cloud infrastructure or chasing perfect uptime. It's building with the assumption that failures will happen, and ensuring you have the flexibility to respond when they do.
