Experts say outages like the one that Amazon experienced this week are almost inevitable given the complexity and scale of cloud technology—but the duration serves as a warning.

That means AI-native apps have double exposure to the risks around a limited number of providers for critical, centralized resources. For AI-native apps, it’s like the mainframe era squared. If the generative AI platform fails, everything built on it fails. And if the cloud that hosts the AI platform fails, it all goes down, too.

Disruptions to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing services Monday morning caused outages for several websites, including Snapchat and Venmo.

Debate whether companies have become too dependent on AWS and its peers, especially when virtually all the in-demand AI services we're banking on are hosted in these clouds. Play another game of Faker or Breaker with three companies impacted by the AWS outage.

Slack, Snapchat, Signal and Perplexity were some of the affected apps and websites, among a host of big names. AWS offers cloud servers that allow these services, and millions of other websites and platforms, to run. AWS is a cloud-computing platform that provides the infrastructure underpinning much of the internet.

Microsoft Azure: Microsoft's cloud computing services is only second to AWS in terms of global market share. Microsoft obviously uses its own cloud infrastructure, but plenty of other companies do too, including Ralph Laruen, Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola, Abercrombie & Fitch, and even local, state, and federal governments.

Venmo users reported issues on Monday morning, Oct. 20, after an Amazon Web Services outage triggered widespread issues.

AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure.