Oct 26, 2025
3 min read
The failure of a server in Virginia (USA) caused a global shutdown of several hours last Monday
El fallo en un servidor de Virginia (EE.UU.) ocasionó un colapso global de varias horas el pasado lunes
Updated October 26, 2025, 5:00 AM The global collapse of nearly 2,000 websites, applications and online services last Monday woke the world up to a reality that had gone largely unnoticed.Amazon is more than just a massive online supermarket that millions of people rely on to get their orders delivered to their doorsteps.Founded in 2006, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) division is another cornerstone of the company's business and the world's leading cloud services provider.The founder and architect of its growth was Andy Jesse, who succeeded Jeff Bezos as Amazon's CEO from July 2021.
The market share of the so-called hyperscale companies (those with large-scale cloud computing) is 32%.It is made by Microsoft Azure (about 23%) and Google Cloud (about 13%).This means that about 60% of the world's traffic and Internet traffic comes from electric companies of American equipment.The failure of one of its servers can lead to the kind of crash on Monday from stores like Amazon, Epic Games store, Canva, Duolingo, and Fortnite;And artificial intelligence (AI) such as Chatgpt, from Openai and stress.
Amazon explained last Friday that the global outage in AWS was due to an automation problem, which could not correct a failure in the DNS (Domain Name System) registry.manual intervention to restore the network.
“When one of these servers fails, important parts of the Internet stop working and unexpected tools stop working,” explains Carlos Gómez, professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of A Coruña and researcher at the ICT Research Center (Citic) UDC.
Geographically, the failure occurred in the Northern Virginia region (USA). With more than 650 data centers, this state on the East Coast has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, making it the cloud capital of the world. A large part of the data and images that are uploaded to the network every day go through the optics that converge at this neurological point.
This data center is also one of the oldest at Amazon, which Jeff Bezos founded in 1994 as an online bookstore, but which he oriented from the beginning to the interests of a large technology company focused on maximizing process efficiency and talent.The computer tools developed by its own engineers to optimize e-commerce were the seeds of its role as a third-party service provider.celebrate.Companies all over the world can pay to use their resources instead of developing their own technological infrastructure.More than 76 million websites use them.In Spain, according to Amazon, more than 75% of Ibek companies do this.
Although there are servers and data centers around the world, Amazon's failure also highlights Europe's high dependence on American technology companies for digital communications.Although many services are built, trusts have been built by Amazon (AWS), Microsoft and Google
"It is clear that we are dependent on American technology. In China, they install their own infrastructure and are further away from these American companies, but in the rest of the world we have a huge dependence. It is not that you are obliged to hire these services from one of these big American companies. There are European alternatives. But in practice these are the most common solutions, as they are the most well-known and are considered to work well," said Carlos Gómez.
In recent years, Spain has become a top destination for North American tech giants due to its strategic location, cheap industrial land and environmentally friendly energy costs.The country already has 143 facilities, the largest in Europe after Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Italy and Poland.Madrid brings together 54.8% of the country's capacity.
Amazon Web Services looked to Aragon in 2019 to extend its year and increase the investment plan of six to six, up to 15 billion.Microsoft, Google, Orafle, IBL, Meta and Kyndryl, among others, also operate on Spanish soil.
