Overview
- The mid-November Cloudflare malfunction knocked major sites and services offline, including ChatGPT, X and New Jersey Transit.
- An October AWS incident lasting about 15 hours in its US-East region caused cascading failures that left users, including Roblox players in Britain, unable to connect.
- Three U.S. hyperscalers—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—control over 60% of the cloud market, concentrating risk and enabling failures that can cost the global economy billions.
- Engineers and analysts point to power problems, human and process errors, and software or configuration faults as common triggers that ripple across interdependent systems.
- Reliability guidance urges multi-region or multi-cloud designs, workload portability, automated failovers, independent monitoring and clear playbooks to limit business disruption.