Monday’s Amazon Web Services outage — and the global disruption it caused — underscored just how reliant the internet has become on a small number of core infrastructure providers.
The ramifications of such outages could only get worse if artificial intelligence becomes as central to work and daily life as tech giants suggest it will in the coming years.
Monday’s outage briefly blocked some people from scheduling doctor’s appointments and accessing banking services. But what if an outage took down the AI tools that doctors were using to help diagnose patients, or that companies used to help facilitate financial transactions?
It may be a hypothetical scenario today, but the tech industry is promising a rapid shift toward AI “agents” doing more work on behalf of humans in the near future – and that could make businesses, schools, hospitals and financial institutions even more reliant on cloud-based services. A global survey of nearly 1,500 firms published by McKinsey & Company in May found that 78% of respondents already use AI in at least one business function, up 55% from a year earlier.
“If there’s an outage and you rely on AI to make your decisions and you can’t access it, that’s going to have an effect on performance,” said Tim DeStefano, associate research professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business.
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