Repeated Amazon, Microsoft outages teach us about our Digital ID future

Written by Dr Scott McLachlan on November 4, 2025. Posted in Current News

Over the last two weeks we have seen two major IT failures that very effectively shut-down whole sectors of business and our now technology-dependent society

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) failure ran for up to two days for some clients and affected everything from major banks (including Lloyds, Hallifax, Bank of Scotland, Barclays, NatWest) and finance apps (including Coinbase, Xero, Square) to several thousand ‘smart’ beds, smart home systems (including Ring, Bluetti and Home Assistant), and even educational, retail and recreational apps (including Snapchat, Slack, Signal, Roblox, Wordle, Duolingo, Starbucks).

More importantly for anyone paying attention, it also completely disabled parts of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK tax collector, and the UK Government’s National One Login system – the core of their Digital ID infrastructure and the primary platform on which around two to three million UK company directors are meant to be creating Digital IDs, needed to file mandatory company returns, at the moment.

The Microsoft Azure failure that followed close on Amazon’s heels also affected the online services of banks (NatWest) and recreational apps (Minecraft), but went further by affecting critical services for organisations like Heathrow Airport, Alaska Airlines, supermarket chains ASDA and Marks & Spencer (M&S), mobile telephony operator O2, and email for tens of millions of global Office and Outlook 365 users.

Again, we also saw government and public service systems affected, including voting systems in the Scottish Parliament.

Respected and knowledgeable online commentators including David Linthicum, and even the cloud providers themselves, have anticipated the accumulated cost for each outage will likely run to US$ one billion.

However, the key thing for us all to understand is that these outages demonstrated how it isn’t just individuals’ connectivity to the internet that is a single point of failure, but also our dependence on what has been known for two decades as ‘the cloud’ – especially the two primary global cloud providers, Amazon and Microsoft.

The Costs and Issues Affecting Your Ability to Trust Digital ID

While losing your cloud service provider is one issue affecting the reliability and robustness of Digital ID infrastructures, another issue for Digital ID infrastructures is that they also demand recent-model smartphones running the latest version and sub-version of that device’s operating system.

Is your smartphone more than two to three years old? Digital ID won’t work for you. Is your smartphone running an old version of the operating system? Digital ID apps will demand you update the operating system.

Is your version of the Digital ID app itself more than maybe two to three months old? The Digital ID app itself will refuse to work until you update. In order to update the app your device’s operating system will have to be up-to-date, and in order to keep your operating system up-to-date, your device itself will have to be a current and supported model.

Unsurprisingly circular logic, because if you cannot afford to upgrade to a current and supported model, you are effectively no longer able to participate in society.

This is what we suspect resulted in some large percentage of the 86 million seized bank accounts when Vietnam turned on their mandatory biometric Digital ID requirements – that while the Vietnamese government and government-controlled media tried to deflect blame by claiming they were old, forgotten or accounts created by fraudsters, the influx of people seen at Vietnamese banks trying to regain access show they were people who were either poor (those, like subsistence farmers, who are unable to afford a recent model smartphone), security conscious (those who don’t like the idea of keeping all their identity eggs in one basket) or contrarians (those who simply don’t want the government to be their lord and master, in control of and monitoring everything they do).

With the systems our politicians want us using on behalf of their capricious bond-villain-like globalist sponsors, if the mobile phone network is down, if the internet is down, if as we have just seen the infrastructure service providers like Amazon and Microsoft are down, or if your device is not currently supported and either or both the operating system and apps are not up-to-date… you won’t be able to prove your identity (Digital ID), prove you are legally entitled to drive (Digital Drivers’ License), access bank accounts and make purchases (CBDC), access social welfare benefits (UBI), attend to and receive refunds or pay your personal or corporate taxation, travel (e-Passports and eVisas) or, in a potential post- eKaren world, even access the internet, telephony, email and social media services.

Even when the platforms underpinning these Digital ID infrastructures appear to be working, there are countless examples showing the enormous potential not just for flaws…

Like the fact that some not insignificant percentage of company directors in the UK are being told their attempts to create the ‘One Logon’ Digital ID being forced upon them to manage corporate affairs and returns ‘failed’.

The worst part is there is nothing they can do but wait and, it seems, incur late filing penalties while the UK Government work out the ever-increasing number of ‘bugs’ in their lacklustre and insecure Romanian-developed software solution.

And, like the UK’s own attempt, examples from other World Economic Forum and EU-sponsored countries were developed and deployed whilst being knowingly non-compliant and incompatible with international IT security and safety standards that have meant their digital driver’s licenses and e-Passports are not accepted even in other Digital ID countries.

And also, fraud…

Most damningly, the High Court of one country has already ruled the rollout of Digital ID illegal because in that country, as in every other country the WEF and EU are foisting this globalist digital nightmare on, there remains no clear documentation of the potential data privacy risks, nor a clear and defined strategy for measuring, mitigating and dealing with those risks.

The issues that court pointed to were exactly those that IT Security and Data Experts like me have pointed to for nearly five years now – that Digital ID keeps too much personally identifiable and biometric information in one basket thus creating a new and exciting single point of failure.

We have already seen this attract hackers who have stolen hundreds of millions of identity documents with their attendant biometric data (photos, iris scans and fingerprints) from Digital ID repositories in India, Estonia and Romania – including those of Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu.

Two things are common in each case.

First, is the exposure and loss of faith in the Digital ID records – not just because of the records being exposed when they are leaked or offered for sale on the Dark Web and the loss of faith not just by the citizens who lose trust in the government’s ability to maintain their digital ID securely, but also in the extra work that is required by banks, government departments and other authorities to ensure that the person presenting a digital ID for verification is presenting one that hasn’t been tampered with during the attack on the system.

Second, is that even as an uptick in fraudulent activity using the stolen digital ID data is observed we see repeated statements by politicians, many of whom are more heavily protected and thus not at risk, and the globalist-funded mainstream media denying any theft occurred but later admitting it while downplaying the clearly enormous risk to everyday citizens, and stating that theft of Digital ID data that is most certainly being sold and misused is ‘expected’ and acknowledging thefts will only continue to grow (here and here).

Indeed, the focus even in official reports of digital ID theft incidents reproduced on Cyber Security platforms is on the potential impact to the government’s computers and public-facing services, completely avoiding any mention whatsoever of the myriad risks that could befall individual citizens (here).

Note that I am in no way being comprehensive. There are many other incidents involving repositories of digital ID that a web search might uncover.

However, in trying to illuminate why it is incomprehensively stupid to keep all digital identity data about citizens in a single repository, I should draw your attention to the ongoing lawsuit regarding the nearly three billion individuals whose digital identity data was stolen and sold on the dark web after the United States’ National Public Data (NPD) breach in April 2024.

There’s also the incident where hackers accessed, copied and potentially manipulated the Digital ID of all 233,000 people who work for the UK Police force, including the estimated 164,000 police officers, before encrypting the entire dataset and issuing ransomware demands to unlock it.

Not only did the mainstream media barely report on such a significant incident (see here), they downplayed it as only affecting variously some thousands of officers or 12,500 officers and staff of a single, Greater Manchester, police district while ignoring the potential that altered and reactivated or newly created IDs could have been implanted in the system or that there was sufficient ID information to enable quite serious identity fraud.

My search identified only one media outlet that acknowledged, but still downplayed, that the government-contracted service provider involved maintained databases for most or all UK Police forces, NHS trusts and UK universities (here).

The unspoken part of their acknowledgement must certainly be that the hackers had access to potentially millions of digital ID records that access secure sites and systems of police and public services, NHS hospitals, GP clinics and pharmacies, and even university campuses – and we may never know whether the hackers or the people the IDs are on-sold to are using them.

The citizenry of every country that has already rolled out Digital ID systems have been negatively affected.

The citizenry of countries like the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand whose politicians are pushing to roll out Digital ID need to wise up, stand up, and reject both the politicians proposing it and the Digital ID itself.

Before it’s too late for us too.

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