In the last 30 odd days there have been 60 cloud outages across four of the major cloud providers in AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Fusion Cloud. According to cloud and SaaS monitoring firm IsDown, 43 of these outages were for Google Cloud alone, which, along with the other hyperscalers, was contacted for comment on the matter for this article.

The current outage problem as it stands is an indication of the daily challenge facing the cloud providers under not just the pressure of increased numbers of users, but also the risk of using public cloud for anything mission critical or sensitive.

The trouble is that outages are a fact of life. As Tom Fairbairn, distinguished engineer at middleware firm Solace reminds us, “stuff happens” and most tech-based firms and platforms go down at some point. He talks about Facebook’s major outage in 2021, and how hardware failure and human error are generally to blame. But surely this is different – this is the cloud we’re talking about, the bedrock of modern computing.

“A lot of applications are now being built on the cloud,” says Stewart Parkin, CTO EMEA at Assured Data Protection. “Very often SaaS organizations are built on AWS or Azure, so it’s very possible that an entire organization moves into the cloud. Azure then goes down, and all of these workloads – email, Salesforce ERP files, SQL databases – are lost within that, due to their complete reliance upon SaaS on the cloud.”