OP 12 November, 2025 - 12:58 PM
On the map of the United States, there’s a particularly dense area in northern Virginia, nicknamed “Data Center Alley.” According to the BBC, Loudoun County hosts the world’s largest concentration of data storage and processing facilities — nearly 200 data centers. It was there, on October 20, that a failure in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) server brought down a significant portion of the global network. Zoom, WhatsApp, Perplexity, Fortnite — “more than 11 million people worldwide and about 2,500 companies” were affected by what Axios called “the biggest outage” of Amazon’s cloud this year.
Everything eventually returned to normal, but the incident added to a long list of disruptions that have, once again, highlighted the fragility of the Internet. On October 29, Microsoft’s Azure cloud service caused another worldwide outage following an “unintentional configuration change.”
That question is at the heart of our report: as major network outages multiply, experts are asking whether we are approaching a ‘Big One’ — a term borrowed from earthquake vocabulary — that could see the Internet grind to a halt, with potentially devastating consequences. Our lives now depend entirely on it: from payment systems to communications, from public services to GPS — virtually everything in our daily existence relies on the network.On top of technical failures and protocol errors, there’s a new and unprecedented threat: cyberattacks. “You haven’t seen
anything yet,” warns Misha Glenny in a striking Financial Times investigation. He believes the prospect of a large-scale paralysis is drawing closer.
In the UK, four in ten companies have reportedly experienced a cyberattack over the past year. The giants of the economy “seem to be falling like dominoes,” lamented The Standard in London last September. Already last year, Glenny recalls, the British Parliament published a report on ransomware that carried a stark warning:
While acknowledging the reality of the threat, the experts interviewed by Aisha Down — to whom she submitted several doomsday scenarios — take a more measured view. Whether a hurricane destroys Data Center Alley or hackers attack every site ending in “.com” or “.net,” “the heart of the Internet would keep beating,” one expert insists. That’s thanks to decentralized networks, alternative domain systems, and sufficient secondary nodes to absorb the shock.
The real issue, however, is that the Internet was never designed with security in mind. “It was built for interoperability,” another expert told the Financial Times, noting that the system has “multiple layers of vulnerability that can be exploited.”
And finally, there’s the problem of concentration.
A single grain of sand in one of these web giants’ machines in Virginia can throw an entire section of the world off balance.
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Everything eventually returned to normal, but the incident added to a long list of disruptions that have, once again, highlighted the fragility of the Internet. On October 29, Microsoft’s Azure cloud service caused another worldwide outage following an “unintentional configuration change.”
Quote:“A simple outage in a Virginia data center reminded us that the improbable isn’t impossible,” wrote Aisha Down in The Guardian. “If the Internet is one of the essential pillars of modern life, it is still a network — made up of software and physical infrastructure — that is showing its age, leading some to wonder what it would take to make the system collapse.”
That question is at the heart of our report: as major network outages multiply, experts are asking whether we are approaching a ‘Big One’ — a term borrowed from earthquake vocabulary — that could see the Internet grind to a halt, with potentially devastating consequences. Our lives now depend entirely on it: from payment systems to communications, from public services to GPS — virtually everything in our daily existence relies on the network.On top of technical failures and protocol errors, there’s a new and unprecedented threat: cyberattacks. “You haven’t seen
anything yet,” warns Misha Glenny in a striking Financial Times investigation. He believes the prospect of a large-scale paralysis is drawing closer.
Quote:“Cybercrime and cyberespionage have long since overtaken traditional organized crime as the primary security and economic threats. But the danger is about to escalate dramatically in both scale and impact, driven by the revolutionary capabilities of AI.”
In the UK, four in ten companies have reportedly experienced a cyberattack over the past year. The giants of the economy “seem to be falling like dominoes,” lamented The Standard in London last September. Already last year, Glenny recalls, the British Parliament published a report on ransomware that carried a stark warning:
Quote:“There is a significant risk that the state could face a catastrophic ransomware attack at any moment — and be unprepared for it.”
While acknowledging the reality of the threat, the experts interviewed by Aisha Down — to whom she submitted several doomsday scenarios — take a more measured view. Whether a hurricane destroys Data Center Alley or hackers attack every site ending in “.com” or “.net,” “the heart of the Internet would keep beating,” one expert insists. That’s thanks to decentralized networks, alternative domain systems, and sufficient secondary nodes to absorb the shock.
The real issue, however, is that the Internet was never designed with security in mind. “It was built for interoperability,” another expert told the Financial Times, noting that the system has “multiple layers of vulnerability that can be exploited.”
And finally, there’s the problem of concentration.
Quote:“AWS, Google, and Microsoft control more than 60% of the global cloud computing market — and it’s nearly impossible to estimate, even roughly, how many services depend on them.”
A single grain of sand in one of these web giants’ machines in Virginia can throw an entire section of the world off balance.