After multiple infrastructure scale-up attempts failed to handle the backlog and retry volumes, Microsoft ultimately removed traffic from the affected service to repair the underlying infrastructure without load.
“The outage didn’t just take websites offline, but it halted development workflows and disrupted real-world operations,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO at EIIRTrend & Pareekh Consulting.
Cloud outages on the rise
Cloud outages have become more frequent in recent years, with major providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and IBM all experiencing high-profile disruptions. AWS services were severely impacted for more than 15 hours when a DNS problem rendered the DynamoDB API unreliable. In November, a bad configuration file in Cloudflare’s Bot Management system led to intermittent service disruptions across several online platforms. In June, an invalid automated update disrupted the company’s identity and access management (IAM) system, resulting in users being unable to use Google to authenticate on third-party apps.
“The evolving data center architecture is shaped by the shift to more demanding, intricate workloads driven by the new velocity and variability of AI. This rapid expansion is not only introducing complexities but also challenging existing dependencies. So any misconfiguration or mismanagement at the control layer can disrupt the environment,” said Neil Shah, co-founder and VP at Counterpoint Research.
Preparing for the next cloud incident
This is not an isolated incident. For CIOs, the event only reinforces the need to rethink resilience strategies.
In the immediate aftermath when a hyperscale dependency fails, waiting is not a recommended strategy for CIOs, and they should focus on a strategy of stabilize, prioritize, and communicate, stated Jain. “First, stabilize by declaring a formal cloud incident with a single incident commander, quickly determining whether the issue affects control-plane operations or running workloads, and freezing all non-essential changes such as deployments and infrastructure updates.”
