When the Cloud Sneezes: Understanding ‘Outage Season’
Recent months have shown that even the biggest cloud providers can fail.
AWS, Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare have all suffered major outages, disrupting services from websites and shopping platforms to CRM systems and AI tools.
For businesses, these incidents cause downtime, reputational damage and loss of confidence. So, what happened and how can organisations prepare?
What Happened?
Several high-profile outages hit this autumn:
- AWS (20 October 2025): A DNS automation bug in US-East-1 corrupted internal records for DynamoDB, cascading into failures across Lambda, API Gateway and thousands of apps.
- Microsoft Azure (29 October 2025): A faulty configuration in Azure Front Door’s CDN nodes caused global downtime, impacting Microsoft 365, Xbox Live and airline systems.
- Cloudflare (18 November & 5 December 2025): One outage was caused by an oversized bot-management configuration file, the other by a firewall update bug disrupting 29% of global HTTP traffic.
These were not cyber-attacks but internal configuration and metadata errors, highlighting weaknesses in change management and failback processes.
How Providers Are Responding
AWS
Introducing “Route 53 Accelerated Recovery” and partnering with Google Cloud for multi-cloud failover.
Microsoft
Strengthening change-management processes and publishing detailed post-mortems.
Cloudflare
Adding guardrails to prevent oversized configurations and improving firewall testing.
How Can Organisations Prepare?
Cloud delivers huge benefits, but outages are inevitable.
Businesses need strategies to reduce risk and maintain resilience.
Tools like Cisco ThousandEyes provide end-to-end visibility across ISPs, SaaS and cloud providers.
They detect outages early, pinpoint root causes and monitor digital experience for apps like Microsoft 365, Salesforce and Zoom. AI-driven insights help flag risks before they escalate.
Multi-CDN and DNS failover solutions can reroute traffic when one provider fails.
Many organisations also adopt hybrid or multi-cloud strategies, though these add complexity and cost.
Simulate outages to validate disaster recovery plans and improve resilience. This requires cultural buy-in and continuous improvement.
Cyber insurance with business interruption cover can offset financial losses from downtime.
UK providers like Hiscox and Clarke Williams offer options for dependent service failures.
The Bottom Line
Cloud outages prove that “always on” is a myth. Providers are improving resilience, but businesses must assume failure and design for it.
Observability tools like Cisco ThousandEyes, combined with failover planning, chaos testing and insurance, can turn outages into manageable events.
Ready to Strengthen Your Cloud Resilience?
Cisilion helps organisations design robust strategies with visibility, failover and security at the core.