Late 2025 has seen a few major cloud outages. Notably, the Azure Front Door outage on October 29th and DynamoDB DNS issues within AWS on October 19th.

This seems to have generated a lot of talk regarding availability of cloud providers. I’ve seen many conversations being held on LinkedIn (grain of salt = taken) about how hosting infrastructure in the cloud isn’t reliable enough for production workloads. Seeing these conversations made me wonder; are these concerns grounded in reason, or knee jerk opinions?

Utilizing cloud solutions certainly isn’t the best fit for every business or organization. It is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Each use-case should be considered if it would be best hosted either on-premises, hybrid, or fully in a cloud. Regardless where your infrastructure exists, disaster recovery planning concepts and business continuity plans remain relatively the same. Redundant circuits? Hot site? Backup strategy? Regional or global availability needs? Multi-cloud strategies? These are all questions and considerations for planning your infrastructure.

How many outages has your organization experienced this year? What caused them? Were they caused by construction teams accidentally cutting fiber lines? Or power outages? In my experience, this is typically no more than a couple incidents per year.

Now, despite news and social media coverage, how many significant outages do major cloud providers experience each year? According to AWS and Azure status histories, it’s roughly the same amount on a per-region basis. Nearly all US regions have had 1-2 outages this year for both providers.

The number of significant outages doesn’t seem like it’s any more or less than other organizations. The average datacenter seems to experience around 2 major outages per year which is about the same as AWS and Azure.

Of course, the outages affect way more customers because they’re cloud providers. When a cloud provider goes down, everyone knows about it through social media, news, and first-hand experience. When a specific company has an outage on their on-premises infrastructure, only the employees and customers of that specific company will know about it and it’s less likely to make headlines.

Is your infrastructure running workloads that cannot have any downtime? If so, a strong DR and BC plan should account for cloud provider outages. Multi-cloud environments would protect against single points of failure within Azure, AWS, etc.. Not all organizations will have this requirement, though. Some may be able to tolerate cloud outages. Some simply run workloads that can withstand outages. Your organization’s DR and BC plans will depend upon its needs, so they all will look a little different.

Like I mentioned earlier, the cloud isn’t the perfect solution for all business needs. Cloud providers offer great options for creating highly available infrastructure if it suits your needs, but it has to be well architected to withstand outages. Anyone who works in IT knows that it’s not a matter of ‘if’ an outage will occur, it’s a matter of ‘when’. Cloud providers are no exception to this.

So, the question isn’t will you experience an outage, it’s have you planned for it?

I wanted to share my thoughts after seeing LinkedIn posts demonizing using cloud providers for production workloads and other essential things. Maybe I’m just responding to the rage bait articles/posts that only exist for engagement and I’m preaching to the choir. Regardless, thanks for reading!