It’s easy to forget that all the information processing has to happen in buildings full of servers connected to the internet via fibre-optic cables. Amazon’s biggest and most critical cloud region, known as US-EAST-1, is located in northern Virginia and is home to 70% of the world’s internet traffic. Virginia’s role in web traffic is comparable to the strait of Hormuz for oil tankers – a narrow choke point through which vital commerce flows. It is vulnerable not only to technical error but to cyber-attacks, geopolitical sabotage and terrorism. This was the cluster’s third major outage in five years, each leading to an internet meltdown.