When Cloud Outages Ripple Across the Internet

"Recent major cloud service outages have been hard to miss. High-profile incidents affecting providers such as AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare have disrupted large parts of the internet, taking down websites and services that many other systems depend on. The resulting ripple effects have halted applications and workflows that many organizations rely on every day. For consumers, these outages are often experienced as an inconvenience, such as being unable to order food, stream content, or access online services."

"For businesses, however, the impact is far more severe. When an airline's booking system goes offline, lost availability translates directly into lost revenue, reputational damage, and operational disruption. These incidents highlight that cloud outages affect far more than compute or networking. One of the most critical and impactful areas is identity. When authentication and authorization are disrupted, the result is not just downtime; it is a core operational and security incident."

"Cloud Infrastructure, a Shared Point of Failure Cloud providers are not identity systems. But modern identity architectures are deeply dependent on cloud-hosted infrastructure and shared services. Even when an authentication service itself remains functional, failures elsewhere in the dependency chain can render identity flows unusable. Most organizations rely on cloud infrastructure for critical identity-related components, such as: Datastores holding identity attributes and directory information Policy and authorization data Load balancers, control planes, and DNS"

Major cloud service outages at providers like AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare have disrupted large parts of the internet, halting applications and workflows. Consumers experience inconveniences such as failed orders or streaming interruptions, while businesses face revenue loss, reputational harm, and operational disruption when critical systems go offline. Identity systems are particularly vulnerable because authentication and authorization depend on cloud-hosted datastores, policy stores, load balancers, control planes, and DNS. Failures in any dependency can block identity flows, creating hidden single points of failure that convert availability issues into core operational and security incidents.

Read at The Hacker News