If you were trying to check your bank balance, learn a foreign language or play games online on Monday, you were out of luck; when the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing service went down for several hours it apparently took apps like Duolingo and Roblox with it. In the event the outage was a technical glitch which was fixed quite quickly. Certainly one barometer of global economic risk, the equity markets, was unmoved.
But it did emphasise how the big data companies have become chokepoints for global commerce. Accidents can be fixed, but imagine how such conduits could be manipulated against economic or political rivals by a rogue actor. Someone, in fact, like Donald Trump.
The US ordering its companies to restrict data access for whole sectors or foreign economies would be extraordinary, but not impossible under a president who apparently regards the US tech sector as an extension of his administration and may grow weary of playing with goods tariffs. In cloud services, as with other network technologies like internet satellites, other big economic powers are rushing to build resilience to US hostility. As usual the most salient case is the EU, whose pursuit of “strategic autonomy” is hampered by a failure to co-ordinate and a reliance on regulation rather than hard cash.