Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether they will review the impact of the failure of supply by Amazon Web Services and identify how best to ensure the future resilience of essential national services.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is already working with departments to assess the high-level impacts of the outage, and will use the data gathered to inform future resilience plans for essential national services.

Government is also working to fully understand the broader impact of the outage. Under the Security of Network and Information Systems Regulations (2018) relevant digital service providers - including cloud providers like AWS - are required to have measures in place to boost the physical and cyber security and resilience of the systems they rely on to provide those services. The forthcoming Cyber Security & Resilience Bill will boost those protections and bring managed service providers and critical suppliers into scope.

DSIT will publish the Government Cyber Action Plan this Winter, which sets out a clear approach for Government and the public sector to manage cyber security and resilience incidents.