MPs have expressed concern that key parts of the UK’s digital infrastructure is hosted on servers abroad, following the widespread outage affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) that took various banking websites offline.
The incident affected multiple UK banks, including Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, alongside a raft of other services such as Reddit, Snapchat and Wordle. These three banks, which are part of Lloyds Banking Group, were able to bring their services back online after several hours of frustration from users. However, the outage has led MPs to question whether the UK is over-reliant on foreign data services, with many of the AWS servers located in the US.
AWS eventually issued a statement to say that while the issue that caused the outage had been fixed, ongoing issues may linger as services are slowly brought back online.
The firm said: “We are continuing to work towards full recovery for EC2 launch errors, which may manifest as an Insufficient Capacity Error.”
The Treasury...