With BBC News covering live the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage affecting leading UK banks, and global services, the incident bears striking similarities to the CrowdStrike disruption seen last year.
Banks, like many other sectors, are becoming increasingly reliant on technology, particularly on third-party providers that deliver the specialist services on which daily operations depend.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, which has disrupted leading UK banks and global services, has once again revealed the fragility of this dependence. The incident bears striking similarities to the CrowdStrike disruption seen last year, both demonstrating how a single failure in a major technology provider can cascade across industries.
For instance, customers, including myself, have been unable to log into the Lloyds Banking Group app, while widespread reports confirm disruptions across Barclays, Lloyds Bank, and the Bank of Scotland.
Few institutions anticipated that a third party with AWS’s reputation could experience a failure of such magnitude. As a result, many had not prepared or tested for an outage of this scale, or for the specific recovery steps required to restore critical services quickly.
This was not merely a technical glitch; it was a crisis of trust. Customers were left wondering: Can I trust my bank? Can I trust technology itself?
The outage underscores the systemic concentration risk created by the world’s heavy reliance on a handful of global technology providers. The financial sector, in particular, faces heightened vulnerability from this dependence, as vendors like AWS have become so deeply embedded in the global economy that their failures can disrupt millions of customers and impact critical economic functions.
The event highlights the need for a strategic, coordinated response across banks, governments, and regulators to minimise the risk of future incidents.
Banks must embed resilience into the design of their systems and governance, with board-level accountability for cybersecurity and operational continuity.
Governments should demand greater transparency from the technology giants whose infrastructure underpins much of modern life.
Regulators must continue to challenge concentration risk, ensuring that efficiency and cost savings never come at the expense of security and stability.
Resilience must no longer be treated as an afterthought. Our systems and processes must be secure and resilient by design, with resilience embedded from the outset of every technology and service. That includes developing proportionate response mechanisms to ensure that material services such as payments or payroll remain operational even in the face of major disruption.
Ultimately, this outage serves as a wake-up call. The digital backbone of our economy is only as strong as its weakest connection, and trust, whether in our banks, our data, or our digital future, depends on our ability to make resilience part of our DNA.
