Meredith Whittaker has seized the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage as a pivotal moment to underscore the significant concentration of power within the cloud infrastructure sector. Following the disruption that impacted various services, including Signal, Whittaker, the president of the encrypted messaging app, responded to criticisms regarding the company’s reliance on major tech providers.
In a series of thoughtful posts on Bluesky, Whittaker articulated that the dilemma is not merely about Signal’s choice to utilize AWS. Instead, she emphasized the broader issue of limited options available in the infrastructure landscape, dominated by just a handful of players. “The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice,” she stated, highlighting the stark reality that the entire cloud ecosystem is largely controlled by three to four major entities.
Whittaker expressed concern over the lack of awareness among users regarding Signal’s dependency on AWS, suggesting that many do not grasp the extent of concentration in the cloud industry. “The question isn’t ‘why does Signal use AWS?’ It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers,” she elaborated.
She pointed out that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are essentially the only viable options for Signal to maintain reliable global service without incurring exorbitant costs to establish its own infrastructure. “Running a low-latency platform for instant communications capable of carrying millions of concurrent audio/video calls requires a pre-built, planet-spanning network of compute, storage, and edge presence that requires constant maintenance, significant electricity, and persistent attention and monitoring,” Whittaker explained.
Moreover, she clarified that Signal operates only “partly” on AWS, utilizing encryption to ensure that neither Signal nor AWS can access users’ conversations. The AWS outage also had a ripple effect, disrupting services for numerous other companies, including Starbucks, Epic Games Store, Ring doorbells, Snapchat, Alexa devices, and even smart beds.
Whittaker expressed a hopeful perspective, viewing the AWS outage as a potential learning opportunity. “My silver lining hope is that AWS going down can be a learning moment, in which the risks of concentrating the nervous system of our world in the hands of a few players become very clear,” she remarked, inviting a broader conversation about the implications of such centralized power in the tech landscape.
