UK Government’s £1.7bn Cloud Dependency Exposed as AWS Outage Reveals Critical Infrastructure Vulnerability

The Illusion of Resilience

When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stood alongside Prime Minister Keir Starmer in June announcing £40 billion of UK investments, the atmosphere was celebratory. Four months later, that celebratory mood has been replaced by sobering reality as a global AWS outage exposed the UK government’s deep dependency on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, raising urgent questions about national resilience and regulatory oversight., according to additional coverage

The Illusion of Resilience
Quantifying the Dependency
Regulatory Warnings Ignored
Global Impact, Local Consequences
Beyond Technical Reliability: Ethical Concerns
The Path Forward

Quantifying the Dependency

According to data from public procurement intelligence firm Tussell, Amazon Web Services has secured 189 UK government contracts worth £1.7 billion since 2016, with approximately £1.4 billion already invoiced. The scale becomes even more concerning when examining current active contracts: 35 public sector authorities rely on AWS across 41 contracts valued at a combined £1.1 billion.

The list of dependent departments reads like a who’s-who of critical government functions: Home Office, Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue & Customs, Ministry of Justice, Cabinet Office, and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. This widespread adoption occurred despite repeated warnings from UK regulators about concentration risks in cloud service provision., according to further reading

Regulatory Warnings Ignored

Tim Wright, technology partner at law firm Fladgate, highlighted the contradiction: “That’s a very significant exposure and it’s pretty ironic considering how the FCA and PRA have repeatedly highlighted the dangers of concentration risk in cloud service provision for regulated entities for a number of years.”, as as previously reported

The regulatory concerns have been so pronounced that HM Treasury, alongside the PRA and FCA, has been developing frameworks for direct oversight of ‘critical third parties.’ Yet Amazon hasn’t been designated as such for the financial services sector, despite AWS’s claim that financial institutions use their services to support operational resilience., according to further reading

Global Impact, Local Consequences

This week’s outage affected more than 2,000 companies worldwide according to Downdetector, with 1 million problem reports originating from the UK alone. While HMRC was the only UK government department to publicly acknowledge service disruptions, the incident revealed the vulnerability of critical public services to single-point failures in commercial cloud infrastructure.

Amazon eventually restored services after several hours, announcing by Monday evening that all cloud operations had “returned to normal.” However, the temporary nature of the fix does little to address the structural concerns raised by such widespread dependency., according to expert analysis

Beyond Technical Reliability: Ethical Concerns

The government’s reliance on Amazon extends beyond technical considerations. GMB Union national secretary Andy Prendergast voiced strong objections: “Amazon has a truly terrible track record on treating workers fairly. Shocking conditions in warehouses lead to mass ambulance callouts, staff complain they are treated like robots… In this context, for it to trouser almost £2bn of public money is a disgrace.”

These ethical concerns add another layer to the debate about whether the UK government should be channeling substantial public funds to a company facing such criticism over labor practices.

The Path Forward

The AWS outage serves as a wake-up call for digital infrastructure strategy. As Wright noted, “Until significant diversification or sovereign cloud adoption occurs, the UK government’s own stance shows an uncomfortable contradiction with the very resilience principles regulators have advocated.”

The incident raises critical questions about:

Cloud diversification strategies across government departments
Sovereign cloud capabilities and whether the UK needs independent alternatives
Regulatory alignment between government procurement and financial services oversight
Due diligence processes that consider both technical reliability and corporate ethics

As the dust settles from this week’s disruption, the conversation must shift from temporary outages to long-term resilience. The £1.7 billion question remains: Can the UK government balance technological efficiency with strategic independence, or will future outages reveal even deeper vulnerabilities in the nation’s digital backbone?