Lloyds Bank is down due to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, whose infrastructure underpins millions of major companies’ websites and platforms.

While services like Duolingo or Roblox may not justify the cost of multi-cloud deployment, banking and financial services have a higher duty to their customers. Outages in this sector aren’t just inconvenient – they carry serious economic and regulatory consequences.

This incident underscores a fundamental vulnerability: dependencies on a single cloud provider should never be allowed to create such widespread impact. Adopting a multi-cloud, event-driven approach from day one isn’t just smart, it’s essential to safeguard against the next rare but disruptive outage.

Jamil Ahmed, Distinguished Engineer at Solace,  a pioneer in event-driven architecture, emphasises:

“Even as cloud technology evolves, failures within the system will inevitably happen. “One-of-a-kind”, extremely rare outages or issues continue to plague every service provider from time to time, which is why the need to store valuable information on multiple provider services, known as an event mesh, have arisen.

From a business perspective, there are no excuses to having a single cloud provider. It’s multi-cloud all the way, treating cloud as commoditised compute, not building apps and services that are tied to knowing what cloud they’re in. Unfortunately, when businesses first introduced the cloud into their strategy, about 10 years ago, they made multi-provider usage a problem to solve later on. It is now ‘later on,’ and the strategy of using one cloud service is demonstrably dangerous and negligent. Anyone adopting cloud without thought for multi-cloud on day 1, should opt into an event mesh system or be fearful for that next “extremely rare” event.”