Elaine Ou, Columnist

Can't Stream Netflix? The Cloud May Be to Blame

The centralization of data has made us all more vulnerable to outages.

March 2, 2017 at 1:00 PM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

Cloudy with a chance of outages.
Photographer: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

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When a cloud-storage malfunction at Amazon Inc. temporarily knocked out services including Netflix, Slack, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website, “smart” thermostats and my email server, it demonstrated how much we’ve all come to depend on one company’s infrastructure. It also shows how the centralization of data has made the internet -- at least the part that most of us use -- more vulnerable than it was designed to be.

Although Amazon may be known mainly for two-day shipping, cloud computing is where it actually makes money. The company owns big data centers around the world and rents out computing power and storage on demand. This global cloud infrastructure service is dominated by just four players, and Amazon’s market share is greater than that of the next three combined.