"When the first of these platforms went offline in October 2025, the eight-hour disruption potentially cost billions of dollars in lost productivity and halted operations. Days later, a second platform experienced a broad outage that took thousands of services and applications offline worldwide. For organizations dependent on these platforms, the message was clear: the promise of cloud resilience doesn't equal resilience by default."
"If one region falters, the ripple effect can freeze the entire digital nervous system of a business within minutes. When an outage strikes, customer relationship management systems fail, mobile applications go dark, and artificial intelligence (AI) pipelines stop processing. Beyond immediate service disruptions, businesses also face reputational damage, increased regulatory scrutiny, and lost competitive advantage. In industries where data must flow continuously-and today, that's most industries-even brief interruptions compound into existential threat"
Two of the world's largest cloud platforms experienced major outages within one week, causing multi-hour disruptions and widespread service failures. The first outage lasted eight hours and likely caused billions in lost productivity; the second took thousands of services offline worldwide. Geographic redundancy and sophisticated infrastructure alone did not prevent systemic failure because concentration risk and single-provider SaaS dependencies propagated outages across hybrid and multi-cloud estates. When outages occur, CRM systems, mobile apps, and AI pipelines can stop processing, producing reputational damage, regulatory scrutiny, and lost competitive advantage. Protections must be incorporated deliberately into architecture to achieve operational resilience.
Read at Harvard Business Review
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