Citing the recent cases of cloud crashes at Amazon and the failures at the cloud related failures at PayPal, Reddit and Github, the article claims that the internet is fragile and may not be up to the tasks that the new cloud and IoT uses are chucking at it.

The latest disruption occurred last week, when customers of DoorDash, Hulu and other websites complained that they couldn't connect. The problems were traced to Amazon Web Serviceswhich reported that outages in two of its 26 geographic regions were affecting services nationwide. A similar disruption took place 7 December, crippling video streams, halting internet-connected robot vacuum cleaners and even shutting down pet food dispensers in a series of reminders of how much life has moved online, especially during the coronavirus pandemic.

AWS published an unusually detailed description of what went wrong, along with an apology.

Experts in computer science and security said the interruptions don't really call into question the fundamental design of the internet, one of the founding ideas of which was that a distributed system can mostly continue functioning even if one piece goes down.

But they said the problems are rooted in the uneven development of the internet, because certain data centers are more important than others; cloud businesses run by Amazon, Google and Microsoft concentrate more power, and corporate customers of cloud services don't always want to pay extra for backup systems and staff members.

Sean O'Brien, a lecturer in cybersecurity at Yale Law School, said the outages call into question the wisdom of relying so much on big data centres.

"The cloud has never been sustainable and is merely a euphemism for concentrated network resources controlled by a centralised entity," he said, adding that alternatives like peer-to-peer technology and edge computing may gain favor.

He wrote after last week's outage that the big cloud providers amounted to a "feudal" system.

Vahid Behzadan, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of New Haven said that there were too many points of failure whose unavailability or suboptimal operation would affect the global experience of the internet.

"The fact that we've had repeated outages in a short period of time is a cause for alarm, particularly as businesses have staked a lot on the assumption that cloud services are resilient,” Behzadan said.