UK’s Digital ID Dreams Shaken After Widespread AWS Outage

When Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down on 20 October 2025, the ripple effects were felt across the globe – perhaps more than most people would’ve expected.

The outage took down banking apps, e-commerce sites, government services and even smart home systems. In fact, in the UK, customers at major banks were unable to log into their accounts, while parts of HMRC’s online infrastructure were also disrupted. And ultimately, the outage highlighted a really big issue that needs to be addressed – that is, how dependent the internet (and by extension, modern society), has become on AWS.

This outage has reignited debate around the UK government’s proposed national digital ID system, a scheme designed to give citizens a secure way to access services online. The event served as an uncomfortable reminder – when one cloud provider falters, the knock-on effects can be catastrophic, and there’s not a hell of a lot that can be done about it.

What Happened and Why It Hit So Hard

According to reports that have emerged in the wake of the incident, the outage stemmed from a technical fault in AWS’s US East data centre, where a problem with its Domain Name System (DNS) caused widespread connection failures. DNS is effectively the phonebook of the internet – it translates domain names into IP addresses. So, when that system stalls, the internet simply can’t find what it’s looking for.

Because AWS powers so much of the modern web – from streaming services and payment processors to government systems – a single failure can cascade through multiple layers of the digital ecosystem. According to users, UK banking apps, delivery platforms and even smart home devices went offline within minutes.

Indeed, the sheer reach of AWS meant this wasn’t just a technical hiccup but a temporary fracture in the digital infrastructure underpinning everyday life.

Why Does the AWS Outage Have To Do With Digital ID?

The UK’s digital ID initiative is designed to allow people to access services such as healthcare, benefits and tax systems using one verified identity. So, in theory, it’s about making life easier and more secure. But, the AWS outage has exposed serious questions about resilience and sovereignty.

Essentially, the issue is that if a digital ID system relies heavily on a cloud provider like AWS, a major outage could lock millions of people out of essential services. Worse still, if those services are hosted outside the UK (as many currently are), the government’s ability to control, recover and safeguard that data becomes very limited. In other words, the convenience of the cloud might come at the expense of national resilience, and it could really convert what started off as convenience to serious inconvenience (and much worse).

But, the Case For Digital ID Remains Strong

Having said all this, however, it’s important to recognise that the AWS incident doesn’t immediately make the whole case for digital ID redundant. Advocates of the system argue that such an infrastructure could reduce fraud, simplify authentication and provide a seamless experience across public and private services. According to supporters, the problem isn’t the vision, it’s more about the architecture.

Cloud outages, they argue, are rare, and they can be mitigated with proper redundancy measures including multiple regional deployments or backup providers. A well-built digital ID platform could still thrive if it’s well-designed with resilience in mind. For many in the tech sector, this outage is actually a bit of a wake-up call rather than a death sentence. It’s more about sparking conversations about how the digital ID system could be built better, with stronger systems and better, more reliable archietcture.

Digital ID Weaknesses Are Now In Plain Sight

Still, the flaws exposed by the outage can’t be ignored.

The first, and arguably the main, issue is overdependence. When one company hosts such a large share of the internet, it creates a single point of failure. According to Yahoo News, this concentration of power means that any disruption to AWS – whether technical, political or security-related – can ripple across thousands of organisations at once.

The second issue is sovereignty. If the UK’s digital identity infrastructure depends on servers hosted overseas, it raises questions about jurisdiction, security and accountability. And during the outage, MPs started to raise questions about why so much of the UK’s IT backbone resides in data centres located in the United States, and to be fair, it’s a good question.

The third issue is complexity. While a digital ID system simplifies access for users, the backend infrastructure is far more intricate than we may realise. Every connection between systems increases the potential for cascading failure. What should be a smooth login could suddenly depend on dozens of interconnected processes – each one vulnerable to an external disruption.

Finally, there’s trust – the thing that all of this is built upon.

For any digital ID programme to succeed, citizens need to believe it’s reliable. If outages like this one prevent people from logging into essential services, confidence could evaporate before the system even fully launches.

What Needs To Change?

If the UK government remains committed to rolling out a national digital ID, this outage should serve as a catalyst for reform. Systems of such importance shouldn’t rely on a single cloud provider or even a single region. Multi-cloud redundancy, local data hosting and robust offline failover systems should be treated as non-negotiables.

Cloud providers themselves also have a role to play in the game. They must build greater transparency into how their services are structured, offer clearer guarantees on uptime and work more closely with governments to ensure critical systems aren’t at risk of being brought down by a single point of failure.

For startups and scale-ups watching from the sidelines, the message is quite clear: cloud computing is incredibly powerful, but convenience should never outweigh resilience. Redundancy, regional diversity and clear contingency planning should be built into every layer of a product that depends on external infrastructure. Don’t allow convenience to overshadow other important issues.

Regulation and Oversight: Ensuring Accountability in Critical Infrastructure

The AWS outage also raises important questions about regulation and oversight.

According to James Barnes, “the lesson isn’t that they need new policy or laws, it’s that we need better oversight and enforcement of these regulations.”

In other words, while the UK has a framework in place to safeguard critical systems like digital ID, the outage highlights that the challenge lies less in legislation and more in ensuring these rules are rigorously applied, with proper accountability when failures occur.

A Reality Check for Digital Transformation?

The AWS outage was more than a glitch – it was a glimpse into the fragility of our digital dependence. The incident exposed how quickly confidence in digital systems can falter when the underlying infrastructure isn’t truly resilient.

The UK’s digital ID ambitions remain an exciting step toward modernising public services, but they now face a crucial test. If the system is to succeed, it must be engineered for the messy, unpredictable nature of the real world – where even tech giants stumble.

Yesterday’s outage was a warning shot. The question now is whether policymakers and engineers are willing to listen.

Our Experts

• Dr John Bates: CEO of SER Group
• Ori Yemini: CTO and co-founder of ControlMonkey
• Florian Fournier: Co-Founder at Threefold
• James Barnes: Founder of StatusCake

Dr John Bates, CEO of SER Group

“We urgently need to rebuild a strong, native UK tech infrastructure. This outage is a wake-up call for the UK government to make this an absolute priority. The stakes are high, as we saw with the country’s vital systems going down yesterday, but so is the potential for the country to jump-start our own tech scene that is not dependent on others.

“The UK government is making the right noises. Cutting red tape and fast-tracking data centre construction suggest a more pragmatic approach to digital infrastructure, for example, but we need to move faster, clearly. Let’s hope yesterday’s shock leads to some real action on this front.”

Ori Yemini, CTO and Co-Founder of ControlMonkey

“Yesterday’s AWS outage stems from a failure in an internal networking subsystem, causing instability across core services – API calls for provisioning and updating infrastructure are timing out or returning partial successes. These partial failures are often more disruptive than full outages because they leave systems in an inconsistent state.

“This is where Infrastructure as Code proves its value: once APIs stabilize, teams can re-apply their configurations to automatically reconcile drift instead of manually repairing infrastructure.

“The focus tomorrow and going forward should be on validation. Rerun your IaC plans, verify that deployments are consistent, and test disaster-recovery automation. Resilience isn’t about avoiding downtime, it’s about recovering predictably. If you can rebuild production in another region without human intervention, you’re truly resilient.”

Florian Fournier, Co-Founder at Threefold

“The recent AWS outage exposed how dependent modern systems have become on a handful of cloud providers. A secure identity framework cannot rest on centralized infrastructure.

“It requires a sovereign digital foundation that draws strength from distribution. In such a model, compute, storage, and verification are spread across independent nodes that support one another, ensuring continuity even if parts of the network fail.

“This is the principle behind ThreeFold’s Sovereign Agentic Cloud, a peer-to-peer, self-healing network built for autonomy, privacy, and resilience. By anchoring a national digital ID system on this kind of decentralized infrastructure, governments can create services that remain trusted, transparent, and available even when hyperscale clouds go dark.”

James Barnes, Founder of StatusCake

“We already have regulations such as the Network and Information Systems Regulations 2018, FCA operational resilience regime, and the forthcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill. These already required public bodies and regulated business to ensure that critical UK infrastructure is built for continuity, redundancy, & with incident response hard baked in.

“So the lesson isn’t that they need new policy or laws, it’s that we need better oversight and enforcement of these regulations. And that if we’ve deemed infrastructure critical, that there’s full accountability if it fails.

“So the policy priority should be consistent application and enforcement, not coming up with new ones which will equally be ignored.”