\n<\/p>\n
Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy beamed as he met Keir Starmer in Downing Street\u2019s garden to announce \u00a340bn of UK investments in June. Starmer was equally effusive, gushing: \u201cThis deal shows that our plan for change is working \u2013bringing in investment, driving growth, and putting more money in people\u2019s pockets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Four months later, and the tech company was left scrambling to fix a devastating global outage on Monday that left thousands of businesses in limbo \u2013 and shed light on the UK government\u2019s reliance on its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS).<\/p>\n
Figures compiled for the Guardian hint at the British state\u2019s increasing reliance on the services of the giant US internet group, which has also drawn criticism from unions and politicians about working conditions within its logistics and internet retailing business.<\/p>\n
AWS has won 189 UK government contracts worth \u00a31.7bn since 2016 \u2013 during which time it has invoiced about \u00a31.4bn, according to the figures compiled by Tussell, a public procurement intelligence firm.<\/p>\n
The research group added that \u201c35 public sector authorities currently use [AWS] services across 41 contracts worth a combined \u00a31.1bn. Key ministerial departments have contracts with the company such as the Home Office, DWP, HMRC, [the Ministry of Justice], the Cabinet Office and Defra.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/span>A screengrab of the HMRC website during the outage on Monday 20 October.<\/span> Photograph: HMRC.gov.uk\/PA<\/p>\n Tim Wright, a technology partner at the law firm Fladgate, said: \u201cThat\u2019s a very significant exposure and its pretty ironic considering how the FCA [Financial Conduct Authority] and the PRA [Prudential Regulation Authority] have repeatedly highlighted the dangers of concentration risk in cloud service provision for regulated entities for a number of years.<\/p>\n \u201cRecent moves by HM Treasury, the PRA and FCA to establish direct oversight of \u2018critical third parties\u2019 aim to address precisely the risk of outages like that suffered by AWS, yet until significant diversification or sovereign cloud adoption occurs, the UK government\u2019s own stance shows an uncomfortable contradiction with the very resilience principles regulators have advocated.\u201d<\/p>\n The House of Commons\u2019 treasury committee has written to the economic secretary to the Treasury, Lucy Rigby, to ask why the government had not yet designated Amazon a \u201ccritical third party\u201d to the UK\u2019s financial services sector \u2013 which would expose the tech firm to financial regulatory oversight.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Business Today<\/span><\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The committee chair, Meg Hillier, said Amazon had recently told the committee that financial services customers were using AWS to support their \u201cresilience\u201d and that AWS offered \u201cmultiple layers of protection\u201d.<\/p>\n More than 2,000 companies worldwide were affected by this week\u2019s outage, according to Downdetector, a site that monitors internet outages, with 8.1m reports of problems from users including 1.9m reports in the US, 1m in the UK and 418,000 in Australia.<\/p>\n Among the UK government contracts, only HMRC said it was affected. It said that customers were \u201chaving problems accessing our online services\u201d, and urged them to call back later as its phone lines were busy.<\/p>\n Many of the sites were restored after a few hours, but some experienced persistent problems throughout the day. By Monday evening, Amazon said all of its cloud services had \u201creturned to normal operations\u201d.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, unions have long questioned if Amazon\u2019s track record of working conditions in its huge warehouses should rule it out of government contracts.<\/p>\n Andy Prendergast, the national secretary of the GMB union, said: \u201cAmazon has a truly terrible track record on treating workers fairly.<\/p>\n \u201cShocking conditions in warehouses lead to mass ambulance callouts, staff complain they are treated like robots and worked until they drop and \u2013 despite being one of the richest companies on the planet \u2013 paid poverty pay until workers went on strike for six months.<\/p>\n \u201cIn this context, for it to trouser almost \u00a32bn of public money is a disgrace.\u201d<\/p>\n AWS did not provide a comment. A spokesperson for Amazon\u2019s fulfilment centres said that the \u201cvast majority\u201d of ambulance callouts at its sites were not \u201cwork-related\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy beamed as he met Keir Starmer in Downing Street\u2019s garden to announce \u00a340bn of UK investments in June. Starmer was equally effusive, gushing: \u201cThis deal shows that our plan for change is working \u2013bringing in investment, driving growth, and putting more money in people\u2019s pockets.\u201d Four months later, and the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[17479,422,539,3926,1870,5758,12719,1399,5614,1561,812,3352],"class_list":{"0":"post-29618","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-1-7bn","9":"tag-amazon","10":"tag-exposed","11":"tag-exposure","12":"tag-giant","13":"tag-outage","14":"tag-reliance","15":"tag-services","16":"tag-significant","17":"tag-states","18":"tag-tech","19":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}