Why the UK Gov Website FAILED

Key Takeaways

It seems like a great idea that more and more of our life is digital like what they're pushing in the UK with a digital ID, right? What can go wrong? So many things including the following which I tested myself earlier today. The HMRC website is down as global outage hits major providers. And I also encountered something like this. This is from MSN. For those of you who don't know, this is HMRC. This is the UK tax website. So because of a problem in the US, the UK government website went down. So as they say here on the Telegraph, more than a thousand websites and apps hit by the huge internet blackout, and this Amazon failure exposes our dangerous digital dependencies. This should be a wake-up call. So think about it. The UK government wants to use a digital ID. What can go wrong? I mean, there's many issues with that with regards to privacy and perhaps what they plan to do with digital ID. A lot of people are warning about the fact that this could be used to control access to various systems. But just from a technical networking point of view, the problem is if the government implements these services, what happens when AWS goes down? It's most likely that the government systems just like HMRC and other government websites are going to leverage AWS or Azure or another cloud service to host their data and host their applications. And what happens when one of those websites goes down? What happens with your data? Is your data going to remain in the UK or remain in Europe if these government systems are leveraging services from US hyperscalers? From a privacy point of view, who has access to your data and which government jurisdiction applies to your data if it's hosted in AWS perhaps in the US? So lots of problems with our lives becoming more and more digital as shown just by this example where something happened as they talk about here with a DNS resolution of the Dynamo DB API endpoint in US East1. So because of an issue in AWS in US East1 it affected thousands of companies and millions of users around the world in the UK in Australia in the US etc. Just another thing to be aware of when companies and governments decide to use digital infrastructure and forget that their digital infrastructure is probably hosted on only one of a few hyperscalers like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. But what are your thoughts about this? Are you worried about our lives becoming more and more digital and our data being stored by these hyperscalers? Or do you prefer it that way? What are your thoughts? Do you think digital ID is a good thing? Do you think that this path that the world is going is a good thing where governments are deciding what you can and can't access? Like in the UK, they are blocking various websites. We have the UK government trying to find 4chan for not doing what they want them to do even though 4chan doesn't have a UK presence. What are your thoughts about where the world is going and the fact that our data is being stored in data centers by these few hyperscalers?