The One Where We Realized Jeff Bezos Is One Click Away From Everything

15 hours offline exposed what we've been trained to ignore: your bank, hospital, and government all rent from the same billionaire #nokings

Oct 21, 2025

📰 What Happened

On Monday October 20, the internet broke—again, courtesy of Amazon. Around 3 a.m. ET Monday, Amazon Web Services’ Virginia data hub glitched during a software update, taking down over 100 major platforms including Snapchat, Netflix, Venmo, and parts of government systems.

Within hours, millions realized how many everyday tasks—gaming, paying bills, unlocking doors—pass through one company’s servers. AWS fixed it by evening, but for roughly 15 hours, the world’s online backbone was wobbling on a single thread. This marks the third failure in five years from the same Northern Virginia cluster known as US‑EAST‑1—the busiest cloud region on Earth .

🧠 Internet Cloud Storage Explained

The cloud is a network of powerful computers (called servers) stored in giant buildings called data centers. Those servers do the heavy lifting behind everyday internet tasks: they hold your files, stream your videos, and process your searches.

Instead of keeping everything on your laptop or phone, you’re really borrowing space and computing power from companies that own these machines. You connect to them through the internet and pay (directly or indirectly) for what you use — like a metered utility.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the biggest version of this system. AWS rents out pieces of its global computer network to almost everyone, from small businesses to governments. That means when you watch a movie, order a package, or file taxes online, there’s a good chance part of that process relies on Amazon’s data centers.

This setup makes the digital world faster and cheaper, but it also concentrates control. A handful of companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Google — run much of the world’s “cloud,” deciding where information lives and who can access it. In short: the cloud makes computing easy and invisible, but it also makes it deeply centralized

🤔 Why You Should Care

1️⃣ When Over 60% of global cloud infrastructure answers to three CEOs, that’s not a tri-opoloy —that’s a transfer of power

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority confirmed what this outage showed in real time: the world’s digital backbone is now a duopoly. Amazon, Microsoft and Google which together own over 60% percent of the global cloud market, have made their systems “virtually impossible to exit” through fees, contracts, and code that punish escape. What regulators don’t say out loud is that this isn’t just a competition issue—it’s a governance one.

Lock‑in doesn’t just trap customers; it traps countries. It concentrates control of the world’s information, communications, and intelligence systems in corporate hands that answer to stock markets, not voters. AWS is the central nervous system of the digital economy — and that means it’s becoming the central nervous system of the state itself.

Every government that signs a “cloud partnership” with Amazon is effectively subcontracting a piece of its sovereignty to a billionaire’s balance sheet. It’s not that Bezos wants to rule the world. It’s that he already writes some of the rulebook — and no one elected him to.

2️⃣ The guardrails that were supposed to keep capitalism in check? Gone; verified vintage. And that makes this moment terrifying.

Here’s the thing we’re not supposed to say out loud: the world shifted, and most of us missed it. Democracy is crumbling. Authoritarianism is rising1 — not just in far‑off capitals but in North America itself. Billionaires are the new kings — structurally, not metaphorically — controlling resources and services that used to be public rights. Politicians on the right bend rules, gut oversight, and face no consequences.

In the 1990s, we assumed markets operated within democratic guardrails — antitrust laws, regulators with teeth, political intervention against monopoly. Those assumptions are dead. When Amazon controls the servers that run our governments, hospitals, and banks — and political systems meant to constrain that power are collapsing — that’s not a “market failure.” That’s a regime change.

Worth Noting:
During the 2023–2024 U.S. election cycle, Amazon and the Bezos family directed about $17 million in political spending, according to watchdog United for Respect.
Roughly two‑thirds went to Republican‑aligned PACs, and about one‑quarter of that money supported candidates who denied Biden’s 2020 election victory—the same false narrative that sparked the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. That’s corporate and personal money flowing from AWS revenue into organizations working to weaken democratic oversight — the same oversight that might otherwise regulate Amazon’s power.

3️⃣ Canada’s government runs on American servers under American law

For Canada, the AWS outage was a sovereignty drill in real time. Over $1 billion in federal and provincial contracts sit on U.S. cloud servers governed by U.S. law — aka the same country that less than 12 months ago, said it wanted to make Canada it’s 51st State🫠 .

Under the CLOUD Act, a 2018 law, American agencies can legally access foreign‑stored data from those servers without Canadian court oversight. This means even when data “lives in Canada,” it still belongs to the legal jurisdiction of Washington. These systems host not just email and storage, but the plumbing behind health records, tax processing, transit scheduling, and parts of military logistics.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new Sovereign Cloud Initiative pledges C$2 billion to build Canadian‑owned, publicly mandated storage facilities by 2030 — a digital nation‑building project meant to pull back some control. Until that happens, Canada’s operational reality remains what experts at Citizen Lab and CIGI call a form of “digital dependency”: a sovereign country functionally renting its data back from U.S. tech giants  — aka our health, banking, and military data are effectively leased from Jeff Bezos. That’s not a cloud. That’s colonialism in code.

✊🏽 What You Can Do About It

Connect the dots. Digital dependency and democratic decline aren’t separate crises — they’re different faces of the same power transfer.
Talk about it. The internet isn’t breaking — it’s being privatized into a kingdom with no parliament. Naming that system is the first step toward fixing it.
🇨🇦 Learn More:
1. Follow OpenMedia’s policy campaigns — they turn complex legal frameworks like the CLOUD Act into understandable civic issues.
  https://openmedia.org/article/item/defending-our-digital-selves-a-guide-for-canadians-to-reclaim-digital-autonomy-from-foreign-tech-giants
2. Read Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ analyses — they situate current tech dependence in the broader story of economic sovereignty.
  https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/canadas-fight-over-digital-sovereignty-is-just-getting-started/
3. Use Citizen Lab’s reporting for technical, rights‑based evidence to counter official optimism.

Sources:

Obviously, we’re not fans of Bezos, but we are fans of Bo Burnham. Hope this satirical video from Burnham’s COVID project Inside helps spark joy as you contemplate late-stage capitalism, the end of democracy and whether or not you have enough money to order some comfort food to hold you through it all.

The V‑Dem Institute’s 2025 Democracy Report finds 72 percent of the world’s population now lives under autocratic rule, and the average level of democracy has slipped to its 1985 level.

The One Where We Realized Jeff Bezos Is One Click Away From Everything

15 hours offline exposed what we've been trained to ignore: your bank, hospital, and government all rent from the same billionaire #nokings

📰 What Happened

🧠 Internet Cloud Storage Explained

🤔 Why You Should Care