Key Findings
Inevitability of Failures
All three major providers experienced significant outages, with AWS leading at 52 incidents, followed by Azure (43) and GCP (32) over 24 months.
Cascading Impact
Regional failures routinely caused global disruptions. The October 2025 AWS US-East outage affected Netflix, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, and numerous other worldwide services.
Duration Variance
Outages ranged from 22 minutes to over 6 hours (GCP March 2025 incident), demonstrating unpredictable recovery timelines.
Root Cause Analysis
Network Connectivity (38%)
Most prevalent in GCP outages, affecting Cloud Interconnect, VPC services, and hybrid connectivity solutions.
Capacity Management (27%)
Azure Front Door outage exemplified capacity issues. Critical services became unavailable when CDN capacity was exceeded.
Infrastructure Failures (22%)
Data center malfunctions like the AWS Northern Virginia incident caused widespread service disruptions across regions.
Configuration Errors (13%)
Human and automated configuration changes occasionally triggered cascading failures across multiple services.
The Self-Hosting Myth
False Sense of Control
On-premises hosting doesn't eliminate outages—it shifts responsibility to organizations with fewer resources and less specialized expertise than cloud providers.
Limited Redundancy
Most organizations cannot afford the geographic distribution and redundancy that AWS, Azure, and GCP maintain across global infrastructure.
Recovery Time Reality
On-premises failures often take longer to resolve due to limited expertise, slower parts replacement, and inadequate disaster recovery testing.