WASHINGTON (October 23, 2025) – Amazon Web Services’ major outage this week disrupted hundreds of sites after an API update in its Virginia data center. This outage is an example of what happens when even weakly connected systems begin to fail in sync, according to Neil Johnson, a physics professor at the George Washington University.
Professor Johnson studies the mathematics of complex systems, from AI networks to cloud infrastructure, and his latest research suggests how minor interconnections between companies’ systems can cause failures to “synchronize,” producing what he calls “super failures.” He explores this phenomenon in greater depth in Online Complexity: New Social Physics of Extremes, Misinformation and AI.
Johnson can speak about what makes systems like AWS vulnerable to these chain-reaction breakdowns, why such events are mathematically inevitable in highly connected environments, and what policymakers and tech leaders can do to anticipate and contain them.
If you would like to schedule an interview with Professor Johnson, please contact Claire Sabin at claire [dot] sabin
gwu [dot] edu (claire[dot]sabin[at]gwu[dot]edu).
-GW-