Fox News Chicago Interview with Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy on the AWS Outage
As a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage October 20, 2025, disrupted internet connectivity around the globe, Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy, Co-Founder and CEO of SecurityScorecard, joined Fox News Chicago to explain the outage and highlight how fragile our digital interconnectedness has become.
SecurityScorecard does not currently believe the AWS outage is cybersecurity-related, but as Dr. Yampolskiy explained, the downtime highlights structural vulnerabilities that stem from our increasing interconnectedness.
“Companies all over the world, like Starbucks, Fortnite, Coinbase, McDonald’s, lease infrastructure from AWS to actually keep their services running. So when the infrastructure goes down, you could see massive widespread outages,” Dr. Yampolskiy explained.
Watch the full Fox News Chicago segment below.
Dr. Yampolskiy emphasized that outages like this aren’t unique to AWS. At a macro level, our daily lives depend on an increasingly concentrated group of companies. That concentration is precisely where our vulnerability lies.
“According to the research that SecurityScorecard has done, today 90% of the world’s global attack surface is served by software from only 150 companies,” Dr. Yampolskiy noted.
Although today’s disruption was related to uptime, future failures could be related to malicious threat actors hacking systems or infrastructure that we all depend upon.
“You also have cybercriminals and hackers who also take advantage of these interdependencies,” Dr. Yampolskiy said.
“They can go break into the software of one company, and then use it as a jumping off point to go break into many other companies. We really became very interconnected and reliant on each other, and that underscores a potential fragility in so much interdependence.”
From baby monitors to business systems, everything’s connected
The AWS incident is a call to action to everyone to assess the interconnectedness of their products, tech, and services they rely on everyday, Yampolskiy emphasized.
The growing complexity of our technology in 2025, from smart TVs to Internet-of-Things-enabled fridges or baby monitors, means that every individual and company needs to audit how they are managing their infrastructure and its interdependencies, Dr. Yampolskiy said.
“I believe that we’re going to see more of those kinds of glitches because we’ve become so interconnected,” Dr. Yampolskiy said. “A refrigerator that you put into your house now may be speaking to the internet. The camera or the baby monitor you have in your house is connected to the network… We’re reliant on so many different parts of infrastructure all over the world that a breakage or a cybersecurity incident in any one of those parts could lead to a trickle-down domino effect.”
He advocated for a societal-level shift in how companies approach infrastructure design: “Let’s assume that sooner or later the systems that we rely on are going to shut down… So how do we design our environment and our systems in a way where those systems can recover and very quickly get back online?”
As Dr. Yampolskiy emphasized, companies must think beyond traditional perimeters and plan for failure across the full digital supply chain, whether it’s due to a hacking incident or an uptime issue like today’s outage.
To learn more about building resilience at your organization or in your third-party ecosystem, download the 2025 Global Third-Party Cybersecurity Breach Report from SecurityScorecard or request a free demo today.