Amazon is not only one of the most present digital brands for ordinary people but also for military leaders
My dear readers. Yesterday, our cameras at our houses went down. That’s a pity as we are actually on holiday and would been even more relaxed seeing that everything is all right at home. I think, many felt like us, yesterday. During the day we discovered that many, many others experienced the same. When half the internet goes offline, as it did this week according to OE24’s report, you’re not just witnessing a technical glitch. You’re feeling what happens when a single corporation like Amazon operates as the digital nervous system of both your everyday life and global defense networks. Amazon Web Services — better known to most as AWS — isn’t only the host of Netflix streams and cloud backups; it’s also the digital backbone powering much of the Western military architecture.
Amazon is military contractor
Over the last decade, AWS has become the Pentagon’s most trusted digital contractor. Through the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), Amazon delivers mission-critical data environments across every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. This $9 billion agreement — also shared with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle — connects intelligence networks, satellite communication, and real-time battlefield coordination. It replaced the older JEDI project and forms part of the Pentagon’s overarching Joint All-Domain Command and Control architecture, which integrates land, air, space, and cyber operations. The Defense Department has described JWCC as its “military-grade cloud web,” but in reality, much of that web runs on Amazon’s servers.
In 2024, AWS received an additional U.S. Army contract valued at $158 million to provide IL6 cloud environments — the top-level classification for unclassified defense operations — extending through 2028. AWS systems have been deployed to manage logistics, data flows, and decision support for active-duty units across the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Meanwhile, the NSA’s $10 billion “Wild and Stormy” cloud program transferred massive portions of U.S. intelligence data directly onto secure AWS cloud frameworks. This followed an earlier CIA contract signed in 2013, worth $600 million, which created Amazon’s first “Top Secret East” and “Top Secret West” data regions exclusively for intelligence work across 17 U.S. agencies. By 2025, Amazon’s Government Cloud hosts a large part of the American digital war infrastructure — from AI-enabled drone analytics to battlefield communication hubs.
Amazon is military contractor … for NATO, too….
And AWS’s global reach goes well beyond America. In the United Kingdom, Amazon became the first public cloud provider certified to manage data at high-security national-defense classification levels. Through its Cloud ICE and MOD Cloud frameworks, the British Ministry of Defence integrates AI-powered analytics, satellite imagery, and command systems across land, naval, and cyber forces. NATO, too, now relies partly on AWS cloud frameworks for data interoperability — supporting coordination between national military systems and Europe’s expanding digital defense network. What once required classified data centers now travels through commercial networks designed for consumer reliability but operating in wartime conditions.
Amazon’s role in Russo-Ukrainian war
Perhaps the clearest demonstration of AWS’s military relevance came with the Russo-Ukrainian war. When Russian missiles targeted servers across Kyiv in 2022, the Ukrainian government turned to Amazon for survival. Within weeks, AWS engineers helped migrate critical national databases — from taxation to land registries to banking systems — into cloud regions hosted safely in Europe. More than 40 ministries, alongside Ukraine’s largest banks and universities, continued functioning thanks to server redundancy on AWS infrastructure. As Digital Minister Mykhailo Fedorov later said, “Russian missiles can’t destroy the cloud.” This wasn’t marketing: it was the cloud acting as a strategic shield, keeping a government operational under military bombardment.
Since then, AWS has expanded its cyber-defense services in Ukraine, offering AI-based intrusion detection and cyber-forensics tools. The platform helped defend Ukrainian ministries from Russian hacking attempts and kept military logistics and financial payment systems online. The event blurred the line between commercial cloud services and national security support. The same infrastructure that powers food-delivery apps was now hosting wartime intelligence.
… and you wonder why your cameras are down?
This convergence between civilian and military technology is precisely what makes AWS’s outages, like the one reported by OE24, deeply unsettling. The same global backbone supporting Netflix, Amazon Prime, and everyday email simultaneously underpins encrypted defense communications, battlefield logistics, and intelligence coordination. When AWS falters, even briefly, the ripple affects everything — from smart-home devices to the digital infrastructure sustaining NATO’s defense partnerships.
Amazon’s newly expanded government portfolio intensifies this dependency. Under a recent U.S. General Services Administration agreement, AWS will provide cloud modernization services worth up to $1 billion in savings to U.S. federal agencies through 2028, helping to integrate federal IT systems and accelerate AI innovation across military and civilian agencies. Combined with the JWCC and NSA frameworks, AWS effectively runs one of the world’s largest cross-domain cloud ecosystems — a system as powerful as it is fragile.
In parallel, Amazon’s Government Cloud supports modular deployment in war zones. Through initiatives like the AWS Modular Data Center, troops can deploy entire local cloud stations in remote or contested environments within hours. This technology enables military commands to process surveillance data, mission logistics, and communications without being tied to fixed infrastructure. These “tactical-edge clouds” are crucial for drone coordination, remote radar systems, and intelligence relay — all powered by civilian-branded servers.
The history of Amazon’s role in the state apparatus mirrors the rise of what researchers call the “digital-military-industrial complex” (Intereconomics, 2025). Since its first CIA partnership in 2013, Amazon has become indispensable to Western defense digitization projects. The company’s influence extends through satellite communication for the U.S. Space Force, AI integration for Project Maven, and field-deployable computing for the U.S. Special Operations Command. More quietly, it underwrites European intelligence data-sharing frameworks under the banner of “public cloud innovation.”
What’s new isn’t that armies use clouds — it’s that those clouds are no longer built by governments. They’re rented from corporate providers. AWS provides state actors with rapid scalability and analytics speed that would have been impossible only a decade ago — but it also gives a single corporation critical leverage over multiple nations’ security architectures.
This is the central paradox. The ongoing outage showed that AWS isn’t just a neutral utility; it’s a strategic chokepoint. A company famous for hosting shopping sites and entertainment streams is now entwined in the logistics of war, diplomacy, and intelligence. When that company crashes, entire systems can blink out — civilian and military alike.
In this context, AWS’s breakdown serves as a global warning. When half the internet goes silent, the world is not just inconvenienced; it’s reminded that digital empires have replaced oil pipelines as instruments of dependency. The cloud may promise resilience, but centralization creates fragility — and Big Tech, like AWS, now stands at the intersection where privacy, sovereignty, and security converge.
So remember this next time your browser lags or your app won’t load. The same cloud keeping your online life running is the one helping armies deploy, governments coordinate, and defense systems operate across continents. It is both the shield and the single point of failure.
Welcome to the 21st century’s new battlefield — one where a server outage can shake the world as easily as an airstrike. But we get used to it. The cameras are working again and holiday in the Alps is wonderful.
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