The AWS Factor: Private Infrastructure, Public Consequences
What makes this situation unprecedented is the source of the breakdown: a private corporation. AWS — a commercial cloud platform — is the backbone of countless public services, from e-filing systems to emergency communications. When it falters, so does the justice system.
The question is not whether AWS bears legal liability; under most contracts, it doesn’t. Government clients and vendors like Tyler Technologies typically agree to service-level terms that disclaim consequential damages — meaning neither Amazon nor the platform is financially responsible for downstream harms like missed court filings.
Still, the incident spotlights a deeper issue: dependency on centralized cloud infrastructure for fundamental judicial operations. As the California judiciary modernizes, it has tied access to justice to private networks whose outages can cause real, legal harm.
If one outage can compromise due process — even temporarily — it raises constitutional concerns. Procedural fairness depends on equal access to courts. When that access hinges on the stability of a private company’s servers, due process becomes contingent on uptime metrics.
🛑 As of this writing, eFileCA and Odyssey systems are still experiencing online outages, and e-filing delays. Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Sacramento have confirmed awareness of the outage.
