Experts say large-scale cloud outages are inevitable amid rising digital dependence
Gartner urges enterprises to design resilient, multi-region cloud architectures proactively
IO River’s Tsinovoi advises treating outages as core design parameters
In 2025 and beyond, online services going dark is an inconvenience we just can’t afford – both for businesses as well as average consumers. And when both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) falter within just ten days of each other, one starts to worry about the worst possible scenarios.
SurveyWhat if it isn’t just about what broke that caused the Microsoft Azure and AWS outages? What if the cloud that feeds into and sustains online services has reached a point of no return, where such outages and disruptions are inevitable?
Experts say yes. Not because something is wrong with the internet, but because it’s now carrying a scale of digital dependency that makes every flicker more visible.
“Online outages will continue to occur”
According to Alessandro Galimberti, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, the perception of a growing number of internet outages is misleading. “Cloud outages have always occurred and will continue to occur. We are not seeing a marked rise in outage frequency; we are seeing greater impact because organizations and even the general public increasingly depend on IT, including public cloud providers, which makes incidents more visible to the general public,” he said.
Also read: Also read: AWS outage explained: How it differs from past Crowdstrike or BGP internet outages
Galimberti pointed to the recent AWS downtime, which affected even home users at an unprecedented scale. “During the recent AWS outage, many Alexa users experienced service degradation – and could experience this AWS outage firsthand. Five years ago, with such devices being less common, such an outage wouldn’t have been noticed by many non-technical people.”
My temptation to blame the internet’s “fabric” for these high-profile disruptions is misplaced, Galimberti tells me in an email interview.
“There is nothing fundamentally broken in the internet,” asserts Galimberti. “We need to remember that cloud hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud operate at a scale unthinkable for even most large organizations, and need to face challenges that nobody has encountered before in handling such a large number of workloads,” he says. “A team of knowledgeable cloud provider experts immediately addresses every cloud issue, followed by a proper post-mortem report with structural actions to prevent the same problem from being repeated.”
“Complexity guarantees failure”
That operational scale, however, also guarantees increased fragility. Edward Tsinovoi, Co-Founder and CEO of IO River, and formerly Director of Software Engineering at Akamai Technologies, argues that these outages reveal a structural truth: “Two of the largest clouds in the world failed within ten days of each other… In both cases, the cause wasn’t a cyberattack or a capacity issue. It was the infrastructure itself.”
Also read: Why did Microsoft Azure crash? Company reveals surprising cause behind global outage
Tsinovoi believes these events underscore an uncomfortable inevitability of large scale online services and applications. “These incidents are not outliers. They are evidence of a broader truth. Failure at this scale is no longer preventable. Complexity guarantees it. And that means businesses must stop treating these events as surprises and start treating them as design parameters,” Tsinovoi suggests in his assessment.
Designing for failure, not against it
Galimberti and Tsinovoi converge on a similar message of resilience that must be designed in, not bolted on after a crisis (like an outage) occurs.
Gartner’s prescription is pragmatic. “IT teams need to be very prescriptive in designing resilient infrastructures,” says Galimberti. Tsinovoi expands that idea further, “Treat outages as a design input. Map critical traffic, define fallbacks by geography, codify policies that prefer healthy routes, and automate failover decisions. Invest in cross-provider observability, not just logs inside one platform. Validate continuity through regular game days that simulate provider-layer failures in DNS, routing, and control planes.”
Also read: Microsoft Azure outage: What caused it? Difference with AWS outage explained
Both experts agree that while cloud providers will keep improving safeguards, complete immunity from outages is impossible – and organizations must evolve accordingly.
“The cloud remains the backbone of the internet, but no backbone should stand alone,” said Tsinovoi. “The events of the past month prove that even the largest networks can fail in seconds. Enterprises that move toward orchestrated, multi-Edge architectures are designing for reality, routine outages, continuous service.”
Galimberti echoes the same sentiment in different terms. “It is important to remember that if your organization was affected by this outage, do not let this erode your trust in the cloud. Repatriation or geopatriation will not improve resilience to these risks,” he recommends.
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Jayesh Shinde
Executive Editor at Digit. Technology journalist since Jan 2008, with stints at Indiatimes.com and PCWorld.in. Enthusiastic dad, reluctant traveler, weekend gamer, LOTR nerd, pseudo bon vivant. View Full Profile
