The UK government will publish a plan for handling future cloud outages after last week's AWS failure knocked out several departments. Ian Murray, minister for digital government and data, said that the AWS outage on October 20 affected a number of departments and suppliers, although all services were restored by the evening of that day. "It will take some time to fully understand the scale of the impact. DSIT [the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology] will be gathering a full picture of the impact on government in the coming weeks," he wrote in a parliamentary written answer to Dame Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West DSIT will then "set out a clear approach" for dealing with cybersecurity and resilience incidents in a government cyber action plan it will publish this winter, he added. Errors in AWS's DNS services in Northern Virginia affected many public and private sector sites and apps in the UK and elsewhere, including those run by His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC). They also affected "smart" internet-connected devices including mattresses, light bulbs, and cat toilets. In response to another parliamentary written question from Onwurah, who shadowed DSIT while Labour was in opposition, Murray said the government reckons that up to 60 percent of its digital estate is hosted on cloud platforms, mostly those run by AWS, Microsoft, and Google.