UK politicians to draft outage blueprint after AWS calamity
- Reference: 1761741480
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/10/29/uk_govt_outage_plan/
- Source link:
Ian Murray, minister for digital government and data, said that the [1]AWS outage on October 20 affected a number of departments and suppliers, although all services were restored by the evening of that day.
A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees [2]READ MORE
"It will take some time to fully understand the scale of the impact. DSIT [the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology] will be gathering a full picture of the impact on government in the coming weeks," he wrote in a [3]parliamentary written answer to Dame Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West.
DSIT will then "set out a clear approach" for dealing with cybersecurity and resilience incidents in a government cyber action plan it will publish this winter, he added.
Errors in AWS's [4]DNS services in Northern Virginia affected many public and private sector sites and apps in the UK and elsewhere, including those run by His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC). They also affected "smart" internet-connected devices including [5]mattresses, light bulbs, and cat toilets .
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In response to [7]another parliamentary written question from Onwurah, who shadowed DSIT while Labour was in opposition, Murray said the government reckons that up to 60 percent of its digital estate is hosted on cloud platforms, mostly those run by AWS, Microsoft, and Google.
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The government does not currently have data on how this is split between those suppliers, but DSIT is developing a cloud consumption dashboard "to provide government with greater visibility of cloud usage and costs across the public sector."
Central government departments hold 41 live contracts with AWS worth a total of £1.11 billion, according to data from public sector procurement specialist Tussell. This includes a deal with HMRC worth up to £350 million between December 2023 and November 2026, although it is topped in value by the Home Office's contract for the same three-year period, worth up to £450 million.
[10]Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region in trouble again, with EC2 and container services impacted
[11]Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong
[12]The perfect AWS storm has blown over, but the climate is only getting worse
[13]AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane
In response to a [14]written question from Conservative MP Sir John Hayes on what measures HMRC has in place to keep running during internet failures, exchequer secretary Dan Tomlinson replied that most core systems would continue to operate. "Internal connectivity between HMRC sites and hosted services is maintained through private, dedicated links that do not depend on the public internet," he said.
"This ensures that critical processing and internal operations can continue without interruption."
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He added that some services used by citizens rely on internet connectivity but that there are business continuity plans: "These include alternative communication channels, prioritisation of essential services, and manual fallback processes where appropriate, to minimise disruption and maintain service availability."
HMRC has for several years pushed taxpayers to use its online services, increasing its vulnerability to internet problems. In January, Parliament's Public Accounts Committee accused it of deliberately providing poor telephone services to this end, including cutting off nearly 44,000 people over 11 months who had been on hold for 70 minutes.
Committee chair [16]Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown described HMRC as "excavating its way to new lows in service levels every year. Worse, it seems to be degrading its own services as a matter of policy."
[17]
HMRC denied it was doing this deliberately. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/amazon_aws_outage/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/23/amazon_outage_postmortem/
[3] https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2025-10-21/83776/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/21/aws_outage_aftermath/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aQJIKRC6JDRJmtF5MO_kQwAAABQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[7] https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2025-10-21/83775/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aQJIKRC6JDRJmtF5MO_kQwAAABQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aQJIKRC6JDRJmtF5MO_kQwAAABQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/aws_us_east_1_more_problems/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/aws_outage_myths_reality/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/aws_outage_opinion/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_chaos/
[14] https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2025-10-20/83247/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aQJIKRC6JDRJmtF5MO_kQwAAABQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/22/pms_say_hmrc_phone_services/
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aQJIKRC6JDRJmtF5MO_kQwAAABQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Cargo cults
Wishful hallucinations of politicians meet the reality. Promises are unlimited. Implementation is way out of budget and deadlines.
Is it singularity already, since complexity has seemingly overwhelmed the governance?
Increasing complexity requires increasing specialization and diversification of skills. Experience is becoming obsolete faster than ever. Competence is expensive.
Meanwhile billionaires are running out of ideas how to better splash on toys and mansions, while public education, housing, and healthcare are getting squeezed.
But socialist governments are not much better wasting public money - as incompetence flourishes on lack of skills and corrupt nature of "job creation". While both the gullible public and public servants are being mislead, corrupted or reaped off by the corporate world.
Re: Cargo cults
But socialist governments are not much better wasting public money
See there is a misconception here. Labour and Conservatives are not socialists. If they were, you will see money being splashed on housing, education, healthcare, infrastructure, working people. Instead they splash money on usual suspect big corporations and the rich, while general public doesn't get even basic services. This is classic fascism. Marriage of government and corporations.
They project themselves as socialist, so that people associate socialist = bad and so they can continue with status quo, as nobody will dare to elect actual socialist party.
We don't need yet another blueprint
Outage blueprint? How about HMG shows some leadership and starts to actively diversify its cloud workloads?
Re: We don't need yet another blueprint
Knowing politicians, I suspect it's more likely to end up as a daft outrage blueprint than a draft outage blueprint.
Re: We don't need yet another blueprint
Or use their own datacentres rather than relying on US corporations (with all the risks to reliability and soveriengty which that entails).
Re: We don't need yet another blueprint
Those free tickets to
You could do a lot with that
“Central government departments hold 41 live contracts with AWS worth a total of £1.11 billion”
For that kind of money, the govt could build its own distributed bit barns complete with its own private “cloud”, whilst creating jobs for the locals too
Obviously, instead of doing this, they would give the money to some twats like Fujitsu or Serco who would spend it all on bonuses and deliver bugger-all, while the price spirals out of all reasoning
Oh well. Nice idea I suppose
Re: You could do a lot with that
Crapita joined the chat....
Re: You could do a lot with that
Thank you - I knew it began with a C but couldn’t remember the name!
Re: You could do a lot with that
That's only the direct contracts.
There's also an unknown number of indirect ones, where the supplier is actually running on AWS. Most of those probably haven't even told the buyer - the "small" suppliers mostly don't.
Re: You could do a lot with that
Cloud version of dropshipping. Sell someone else's product and whack massive markup.
Dan tomlinson is obviously a politician..
>"exchequer secretary Dan Tomlinson replied that most core systems would continue to operate. "Internal connectivity between HMRC sites and hosted services is maintained through private, dedicated links that do not depend on the public internet," he said.
"This ensures that critical processing and internal operations can continue without interruption." "
So that okay the cloud services can go down, but internal operations won't be affected because their connection to the cloud services is via private dedicated link...
Lets hope Ian Murray's cyber plan is more proactive and sets the direction of travel to reduce dependence on the US cloud providers....