The domino effect
Beneath the elegant veneer of mobile apps, dashboards, and connected devices lies a labyrinth of technical dependencies. Cloud computing promised affordable scalability and offloaded complexity. As adoption snowballed, a handful of giants (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and a small circle of others became the backbone for modern digital services. These hyperscalers offer infrastructure so ubiquitous that many technology providers, even ones hesitant to rely on the tech titans directly, still depend on them indirectly through partner services, APIs, or even core infrastructure providers that themselves run on the cloud.
When one of these hyperscalers suffers an outage, the impact is uncontained. It cascades. In late 2025, for example, three major outages at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare rippled across industries with astonishing speed. Delta and Alaska airlines couldn’t check in passengers. Gaming and streaming platforms like Roblox and Discord ground to a halt. Even internet-connected “smart beds” and residential video doorbells became unusable.
It’s tempting to write these off as embarrassing but rare moments in the industry’s upward arc, but the frequency is increasing. More importantly, the scope is far broader than what’s visible on outage maps. For every downed social media giant, thousands of enterprises, municipalities, and nonprofits experience the same disruptions in silence, sometimes without even knowing where to place the blame.
