Amazon Web Services

Profile narrative

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon, providing a broad suite of on-demand infrastructure, platform, and software services to individuals, companies, and governments worldwide. The organisation operates as one of the leading providers in the global public cloud market, offering compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, machine learning, security, and developer tooling through a network of data centres and edge locations. Customers range from small startups and independent developers to large enterprises and public-sector institutions, with the platform serving as foundational infrastructure for websites, applications, Internet of Things deployments, artificial intelligence workloads, and enterprise back-office systems. AWS also supports a marketplace for third-party software and professional services, and it offers compliance and certification programmes aimed at regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, and the public sector. Beyond raw infrastructure, the organisation provides higher-level services including managed databases, container orchestration, serverless computing, and identity and access management, positioning it as a full-stack cloud provider rather than a pure infrastructure vendor.

The organisation is headquartered in the United States of America and operates at global scale, serving customers across hundreds of countries and supporting a significant portion of the modern internet through its infrastructure footprint. The breadth of its services and the diversity of its customer base have made AWS a focal point in discussions about cloud concentration risk, particularly because outages or security incidents affecting the platform can cascade into disruptions across numerous downstream services and SaaS providers. As a result, AWS occupies a strategically important position in the digital economy, and its operational reliability and security posture have implications well beyond its own customers.

AWS has been involved in several notable security and operational incidents that illustrate both its reach and its associated systemic risks. In early 2025, AWS was among a group of major cloud providers, alongside Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare, that experienced large-scale outages which disrupted customer-facing platforms and dependent businesses around the world, drawing attention to the concentration of internet infrastructure among a small number of providers. More recently, in March 2026, AWS was among the organisations affected by a supply-chain compromise involving the open-source vulnerability scanner Trivy and the AI library LiteLLM, in which attackers injected malicious code into the build pipeline and harvested credentials from corporate continuous integration and continuous deployment environments. Stolen data from that campaign reportedly included AWS secret keys alongside credentials from other cloud and software-as-a-service providers, exposing the risks that even customers of major cloud platforms face when third-party tooling in their development pipelines is compromised.

As the cloud computing arm of Amazon, AWS operates with the backing, capital base, and organisational resources of its parent company, while functioning as a distinct business unit with its own product roadmap, sales organisation, and compliance framework. This structural separation allows AWS to maintain specialised expertise in cloud architecture, regulated workloads, and large-scale distributed systems, while benefiting from the broader research, logistics, and investment capabilities of its parent.

Incidents

2 incidents linked to this organisation.