George Hahn

It's inside the Oval Office.

For the past century, as we ceded powers from the legislative and judicial to the executive branch, we've been hoping norms would help us avoid strangulation.

And it worked.

Until it didn't.

Last October, a database glitch in Northern Virginia took down Snapchat, Fortnite, Ring doorbells, Coinbase, Reddit, DoorDash, and about a thousand other services.

The culprit was a malfunction at an Amazon Web Services data center, the third major outage tied to that location in the past five years.

DownDetector received 6.5 million outage reports.

Three companies, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, own two-thirds of the cloud market.

These service interruptions rarely result in clients switching providers — leaving is too costly and time-consuming —

After a perfect storm of bad code and a widespread Azure outage knocked airlines, hospitals, and banks offline in 2024, one cybersecurity expert said, this is a very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world's core internet infrastructure.

If you're under 30, that fragility is your lived experience.

That's what makes the cloud such a potent choke point.

It's hiding in plain sight until it isn't.

Mistakes that cause outages are one thing, but attacks from malicious actors are the bigger threat.

Since 2005, 34 countries have been suspected of sponsoring cyber operations, with China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia accounting for a combined 77% of suspected attacks.

Since the start of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, Iranian hackers have hit a medical technology company, stolen and tried to sell data from Lockheed Martin, and breached FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email.

Even more chilling is the emergence of a gray zone between war and peace, i.e., permanent cyber war.

As a 2022 Atlantic Council report explained,

without firing a single bullet, U.S.

adversaries are striking at the fibers of U.S.