AWS has generally been very reliable – the company promises
working servers over 99.99 per cent of the time – and if anything this
reliability has boosted the popularity of such cloud computing
services. In fact, they’ve become so popular that almost three-
quarters of Amazon’s recent profits have come from AWS alone.[27]
However, widespread use of cloud computing, combined with the
potential impact of a server failure, has led to suggestions that AWS
might be ‘too big to fail’.[28] If large amounts of the web rely on a
single company, small problems at the source could be greatly
amplified. Related concerns surfaced in 2018, when Facebook
announced that millions of its users had been affected by a security
breach. Because many people use their Facebook account to sign in
to other websites, such attacks may spread further than users
initially realise.[29]
This isn’t the first time we’ve met this combination of hidden links
and highly connected hubs. These are the same network quirks that
made the pre-2008 financial system vulnerable, allowing seemingly
local events to have an international impact. In online networks,
however, these effects can be even more extreme. And this can lead
to some rather unusual outbreaks.
N came the ‘love bug’. In early
May 2000, people around the world received e-mails with a subject
line that read ‘ILOVEYOU’. The message carried a computer worm,
which was disguised as a text file containing a love letter. When
opened, the worm corrupted files on that person’s computer and e-
mailed itself to everyone in their address book. It spread widely,
crashing the e-mail system of several organisations, including the
UK parliament. Eventually IT departments rolled out
countermeasures, which protected computers against the worm. But
then something odd happened. Rather than disappear, the worm
persisted. Even a year later, it was still one of the most active bits of
malware on the internet.[30]
Computer scientist Steve White had noticed the same thing
happening with other computer worms and viruses. In 1998, he’d