Good morning. A small handful of companies is (barely) holding the internet together – more on that below, along with a potential break on the steel and aluminum tariffs and a Canadian clue to longevity. But first:
Today’s headlines
- Ottawa and Alberta are close to a deal that includes an oil pipeline to the B.C. coast, sources say
- U.S. Congress overwhelmingly votes to pass a bill forcing the release of the Epstein files
- Mark Carney plans to woo foreign investment during his trip to the United Arab Emirates
One company's outage caused error messages across the internet yesterday.Eric Risberg/The Associated Press
Technology
Another flare up
There’s a decent chance you woke up yesterday morning and struggled to do at least one of these things: listen to Spotify; watch YouTube; call an Uber; pay with Visa; use X; use Zoom; use ChatGPT; use Dropbox; order DoorDash; play League of Legends; check Moody’s Ratings (always my first move); or log on to Microsoft Teams. You might’ve tried calling up Downdetector, the website that tracks internet outages. Downdetector was offline, too.
The problem, it turns out, was a temporary bug in the software company Cloudflare, which helps sites ward off malicious attacks and load content more efficiently. More than 20 per cent of the world’s websites rely on its data and cybersecurity services. Cloudflare likes to say that it provides “an immune system for the internet.”
If the simultaneous crash of your favourite apps sounds awfully familiar, that’s because last month, an error at Amazon Web Services caused as many as 2,000 sites and services to go dark for up to 15 hours. (No Slack, no Instagram, no Blue Jays playoff tickets – and no Wordle.) AWS is the world’s largest cloud platform, handling the computing needs of nearly one-third of the global market. It prefers to position itself as the “backbone of the internet.”
You see what happens when the internet’s anatomy starts to malfunction. Just a few companies play an outsized role in holding everything together. As soon as one of them glitches, the entire operation collapses as comprehensively as Russia’s first humanoid robot, which face-planted seconds after its debut last week and had to be dragged off the stage.
Powering the cloud
The pitch of AWS and Cloudflare goes something like this: It’s wildly costly and time-consuming for companies to set up their own internet infrastructure. You need physical servers, storage space, database management, developer tools, maintenance work and a whole bunch of code. Cloud services essentially rent these capabilities to the outside world, and most organizations – banks, airlines, hospitals, governments, media companies – have taken them up on the offer.
OVHCloud's data centre servers in Quebec.Supplied
But there’s not a lot of opportunity for comparison shopping here, since three companies have basically cornered the cloud. Amazon, Microsoft and Google together control 63 per cent of the global cloud services market; Microsoft Azure crashed in October, while Google Cloud went down in June. Cybersecurity experts have warned for years about this sort of consolidation, though the White House hasn’t shown much interest in holding tech giants responsible when their services go wrong. Over the summer, AWS inked a contract to move thousands of U.S. federal agencies onto its platform. Amazon gave the Trump administration a US$1-billion discount on the deal.
Strong and free?
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that Canada is being urged to lessen our reliance on those American tech giants. In September, 70 academics, public servants and organizations (and one Margaret Atwood) sent Mark Carney a letter asking him to bolster the country’s digital independence, and the Prime Minister has started talking about building a “sovereign cloud” for Canada. What exactly might that look like? The details are still being ironed out. For now, AI Minister Evan Solomon tends to deploy a phrase that could be a Zen koan: “Sovereignty does not mean solitude.”
Presumably, that’s because the world’s digital economy is a tightly woven network, where one artery leads to another, then another, then usually back to Amazon. Even if your company doesn’t use AWS, you very likely do business with a company that does – or else relies on Google, Microsoft, the cybersecurity behemoth CrowdStrike or yesterday’s culprit, Cloudflare. When the internet’s immune system sneezes, we all catch a cold.
The Shot
‘Things happen.’
Mohammed bin Salman, Donald Trump and a lot of gold.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump brushed aside the Saudi regime’s 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi yesterday, as he welcomed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to Washington. Read more here about the White House visit, which was heavy on flattery but light on tangible deals.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: Alberta invoked the notwithstanding clause for three sweeping bills affecting trans and gender-diverse youth that are currently being challenged in court.
Abroad: The Trump administration has quietly opened the door to lowering tariffs on some Canadian steel and aluminum exports.
At work: Ottawa plans to eliminate tens of thousands of public-service jobs – but union leaders say they’re still in the dark about how the cuts will play out.
On screen: Your mileage may vary, but our critic wasn’t especially dazzled by the second half of the Oz prequel Wicked: For Good.
New duds: Lululemon unveiled Team Canada’s athlete kit for the 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Milano Cortina.
Old folks: In two towns on either side of the country, Canadian centenarians have found the secrets to longevity.