What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future · Slate Podcasts

The AWS Outage is Only the Beginning

October 24, 2025·28 min·2 clips

Two out of every three new internet cables are funded by just four American tech giants.

Lizzie O'Leary opens by walking through the AWS outage that disrupted Snapchat, Roblox, OpenAI, Ring doorbells, and numerous other services in a single morning, using it as an entry point to a deeper conversation about the physical infrastructure the internet actually runs on. Her guest is Samanth Subramanian, a journalist whose book The Web Beneath the Waves examines the roughly five hundred undersea fiber optic cables that carry ninety-five percent of the world's international internet traffic. Subramanian describes what these cables look like — roughly the width of a garden hose, armored in shallow water and lighter in deep water — and where they run, which is almost entirely along routes that mirror nineteenth-century telegraph cable maps, themselves laid along colonial trade routes. He details the consequences of cable failure through the case of Tonga, which was connected to the outside world by a single undersea fiber optic cable. When the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption in January 2022 severed that cable, the island nation lost nearly all international communications. Recovery took eighteen months. The episode examines what it would take to make islands and smaller nations less vulnerable — multiple cable landings, satellite backup — and why the economics rarely favor that kind of redundancy. A significant portion of the conversation covers the changing ownership of cable infrastructure. Historically, international telecom companies built and maintained undersea cables as shared infrastructure. Over the past decade, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have collectively funded approximately two-thirds of all new cable being laid. Subramanian describes the strategic implications of this shift: the same companies that dominate the platforms now increasingly own the pipes those platforms run through. He is careful not to attribute malice but notes the concentration creates new categories of political and security risk. The episode also covers how cables are repaired — specialized ships, months of work — and what the realistic threat landscape looks like from both accidental damage and deliberate sabotage.

As heard by us

When the cloud blinks, the real world still has to carry the load.

The episode opens in the small, irritating failures of broken apps, failed logins, and stalled purchases, then moves into a sharper account of why cloud systems can fall so hard when they fail.

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Why you'd press play

One outage, and suddenly the whole cloud feels embarrassingly physical.

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