Dr Saqib Kakvi provides a range of comments to the media following major outages in cloud services in October 2025
Dr Saqib Kakvi from Royal Holloway's Information Security Group has provided a range of comments to numerous media outlets concerning outages to cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure's product. Such outages lead to many major services including many popular applications such as Snapchat, Xbox gaming, as well as the supermarket Asda and coffee chain Starbucks being affected.
Dr Kakvi is featured in comments on the BBC News website, The Standard, and Independent, as well as a broader piece by the Daily Mail, discussing the dangers of over-reliance on a limited number of cloud service providers that creates systemic risk.
As Dr Kakvi explains, "The two recent failures in Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure cloud services underscores the dangers of only having 2 or 3 cloud service providers running a huge portion of online services. In both cases there was a misconfiguration of some nodes by the provided caused many hours of unavailability for hundreds of services affected tens of thousands of end users. These events so close to each other underscore the need for better resilience on the side of cloud providers."
"Given the scale of these issues and the entities involved it may be an issue of BGP [the Border Gateway Protocol], which is a protocol that works with DNS [Domain Name Services] to allow discovery of webservices" such as websites and interfaces that allow applications to 'speak to' centralised services through cloud providers.
"Currently Amazon, Microsoft and Google have an effective triopoly on cloud services and storage, meaning that an outage of even part of their infrastructure can cripple hundreds, if not thousands of applications and systems. Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets."
The Information Security Group is a large, multidisciplinary group exploring research across all areas of information, and cyber, security including cryptography, people and society, as well as systems security. Our academics frequently provide expert opinion on contemporary events across the space.
