The online world ground to a halt for many Canadians Friday morning as Amazon Web Services (AWS), the digital infrastructure powering much of the internet, experienced a significant service disruption. From banking apps to airline bookings, the ripple effects quickly spread across industries, reminding us just how dependent our digital economy has become on centralized cloud providers.
I first noticed something was amiss when my morning routine of checking Delta Airlines for an upcoming business trip returned only error messages. Within minutes, my phone lit up with messages from contacts across Toronto’s tech corridor reporting similar issues with everything from Slack to Instacart.
“We’re seeing unprecedented latency across multiple AWS regions,” explained Sameer Patel, CTO at Stackline, a Toronto-based software development firm. “This isn’t just affecting consumer apps – it’s disrupting backend systems that ordinary people don’t even realize they depend on.”
The outage primarily stemmed from problems with AWS’s US East-1 region, according to Amazon’s service health dashboard. While this data center cluster is physically located in Northern Virginia, its impact extends globally due to how many Canadian companies route their services through these American facilities.
The Bank of Montreal temporarily lost access to mobile banking features, while Air Canada reported delays in its booking and check-in systems. Even the Toronto Transit Commission experienced disruptions to its trip-planning app, leaving commuters scrambling for alternatives during the morning rush.
This technical failure highlights Canada’s complex relationship with foreign technology infrastructure. Despite our robust domestic tech sector, approximately 78% of Canadian businesses using cloud services rely on American providers, according to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority’s 2023 report.
“There’s a fundamental tension between the convenience of using established cloud giants and the resilience that comes with distributing systems across multiple providers,” said Maya Rodriguez, cloud infrastructure specialist at the Digital Policy Institute of Canada. “Most businesses optimize for cost and convenience until something breaks.”
The financial impact extends beyond immediate service disruptions. According to Gartner Research, major cloud outages cost enterprises an average of $5,600 per minute in lost productivity and revenue. For companies heavily dependent on digital transactions, those costs can balloon dramatically.
WestJet spokesperson Jennifer Hutchinson confirmed the airline experienced “significant delays in reservation processing” but maintained that operational safety systems remained unaffected as they operate on separate infrastructure.
The technical explanation behind the outage involves AWS’s networking systems experiencing what engineers call “cascading failures” – when one component fails, triggering additional failures across interdependent systems. While Amazon engineers scrambled to implement fixes, many Canadian businesses activated their backup plans – or discovered they didn’t have adequate ones.
“This is exactly why we built redundancy into our critical systems last year,” said Raj Mehta, founder of Toronto-based fintech startup PaymentLogic. “We were able to switch to Microsoft Azure within minutes, while many of our competitors remained down for hours.”
By mid-afternoon, Amazon reported they had resolved the underlying networking issues, though some services continued experiencing lingering effects. The company promised a full post-incident analysis would be forthcoming.
For average Canadians, the outage served as an unexpected reminder of digital fragility. Grocery deliveries were delayed, streaming services buffered endlessly, and some remote workers found themselves unexpectedly disconnected from workplace tools.
“I couldn’t access any of my design files stored in our cloud repository,” said Melissa Chen, a graphic designer at a marketing agency in Vancouver. “My entire workday essentially disappeared.”
Industry experts have long warned about the concentration risks of having so many services dependent on a handful of cloud providers. According to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, over 90% of enterprise cloud workloads run on just three providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
“What we’re seeing isn’t just technical failure – it’s market failure,” argued Dr. Alisha Karim, professor of digital economy at University of Toronto. “When so many essential services depend on so few providers, these outages become a public policy concern, not just a business inconvenience.”
The vulnerability extends beyond commercial interests. Several municipal emergency notification systems across Canada reported degraded performance during the outage, though critical 911 services remained operational as they typically run on separate, hardened infrastructure.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has previously examined cloud concentration risks but has limited regulatory authority over foreign infrastructure providers. This regulatory gap creates challenges for ensuring digital resilience across the Canadian economy.
As services gradually returned to normal by evening, the incident offers valuable lessons for both businesses and consumers. For organizations, it underscores the importance of multi-cloud strategies and disaster recovery planning. For individuals, it highlights the value of maintaining offline alternatives for critical tasks.
“Every major outage should prompt the same question,” said Rodriguez. “Are we comfortable with how dependent we’ve become on systems we neither control nor fully understand?”
As I wrapped up interviews for this piece, I received an ironic notification – my cloud backup service had finally resumed operation, hours after the initial outage. Sometimes, even our recovery systems need recovery.
