Why cloud outages are becoming normal

The Microsoft Azure outage that dragged out for 10 hours in early February serves as another stark reminder that the cloud, for all its promise, is not immune to failure. At precisely 19:46 UTC on February 2, the Azure cloud platform began experiencing cascading issues stemming from an initial misconfiguration of a policy affecting Microsoft-managed storage accounts. This seemingly minor error ballooned outwards, knocking out two of the most critical layers underpinning enterprise cloud success: virtual machine operations and managed identities.

By the time the dust began to settle, more than 10 hours later at 06:05 UTC the next morning, customers across multiple regions were unable to deploy or scale virtual machines. Mission-critical development pipelines ground to a halt, and hundreds of organizations struggled to execute even the simplest tasks on Azure. The ripple effect spread across production systems and workflows central to developer productivity, including CI/CD pipelines that run through Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions. Compounding the issue, managed identity services faltered, especially in the eastern and western United States, disrupting authentication and access to cloud resources across a swath of essential Azure offerings, from Kubernetes clusters to analytics platforms and AI operations.

The after-action report is all too familiar: an initial fix triggers a surge in service traffic, further overwhelming already-struggling platforms. Mitigation efforts, such as scaling up infrastructure or temporarily taking services offline, eventually restore order, but not before damage is done. Disrupted operations lead to lost productivity, delayed deployments, and, perhaps most insidiously, a reinforcement of the growing sense that major cloud outages are simply part of the territory of modern enterprise IT.

As the headlines become more frequent and the incidents themselves start to blur together, we have to ask: Why are these outages becoming a monthly, sometimes even weekly, story? What’s changed in the world of cloud computing to usher in this new era of instability? In my view, several trends are converging to make these outages not only more common but also more disruptive and more challenging to prevent.

Human error creeps in

It’s no secret that the economic realities of cloud computing have shifted. The days of unchecked growth are over. Headcounts no longer expand to keep pace with surging demand. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft, AWS, Google, and others have announced substantial layoffs in recent years, many of which have disproportionately affected operational, support, and engineering teams—the very people responsible for ensuring that platforms run smoothly and errors are caught before they reach production.

The predictable outcome is that when experienced engineers and architects leave, they are often replaced by less-skilled staff who lack deep institutional knowledge. They lack adequate experience in platform operations, troubleshooting, and crisis response. While capable, these “B Team” employees may not have the skills or knowledge to anticipate how minor changes affect massive, interconnected systems like Azure.

The recent Azure outage resulted from precisely this type of human error, in which a misapplied policy blocked access to storage resources required for VM extension packages. This change was likely rushed or misunderstood by someone unfamiliar with prior issues. The resulting widespread service failures were inevitable. Human errors like this are common and likely to recur given current staffing trends.

Damage is greater than before

Another trend amplifying the impact of these outages is the relative complacency about resilience. For years, organizations have been content to “lift and shift” workloads to the cloud, reaping the benefits of agility and scalability without necessarily investing in the levels of redundancy and disaster recovery that such migrations require.

There is growing cultural acceptance among enterprises that cloud outages are unavoidable and that mitigating their effects should be left to providers. This is both an unrealistic expectation and a dangerous abdication of responsibility. Resilience cannot be entirely outsourced; it must be deliberately built into every aspect of a company’s application architecture and deployment strategy.

However, what I’m seeing in my consulting work, and what many CIOs and CTOs will privately admit, is that resilience is too often an afterthought. The impact of even brief outages on Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud now ricochets far beyond the IT department. Entire revenue streams grind to a halt, and support queues overflow. Customer trust erodes, and recovery costs skyrocket, both financial and reputational. Yet investment in multicloud strategies, hybrid redundancies, and failover contingencies lags behind the pace of risk. We’re paying the price for that oversight, and as cloud adoption deepens, the costs will only increase.

Systems at the breaking point

Hyperscale cloud operations are inherently complex. As these platforms become more successful, they grow larger and more complicated, supporting a wide range of services such as AI, analytics, security, and Internet of Things. Their layered control planes are interconnected; a single misconfiguration, such as with Microsoft Azure, can quickly lead to a major disaster.

The size of these environments makes them hard to operate without error. Automated tools help, but each new code change, feature, and integration increases the likelihood of mistakes. As companies move more data and logic to the cloud, even minor disruptions can have significant effects. Providers face pressure to innovate, cut costs, and scale, often sacrificing simplicity to achieve these goals.

Enterprises and vendors must act

As we analyze the recent Azure outage, it’s obvious that change is necessary. Cloud providers must recognize that cost-cutting measures, such as layoffs or reduced investment in platform reliability, will ultimately have consequences. They should focus more on improving training, automating processes, and increasing operational transparency.

Enterprises, for their part, cannot afford to treat outages as inevitable or unavoidable. Investment in architectural resilience, ongoing testing of failover strategies, and diversification across multiple clouds are not just best practices; they’re survival strategies.

The cloud continues to be the engine of innovation, but unless both sides of this partnership raise their game, we’re destined to see these outages repeat like clockwork. Each time, the fallout will spread a little further and cut a little deeper.