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The year the cloud went dark: Inside 2025’s biggest tech outages
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For a world that lives online, 2025 was a reminder of just how fragile the internet’s backbone can be.
From payment systems and airlines to messaging apps and multiplayer games, millions of users across the globe were locked out of essential services this year as a wave of cloud outages, configuration failures and cyberattacks rippled through the digital economy. Some disruptions lasted minutes. Others dragged on for days. Together, they exposed a hard truth: even the most advanced cloud infrastructure can fail—often at the worst possible moment.
The year’s most consequential outages hit the biggest names in cloud computing. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—providers that together control nearly two-thirds of the global cloud services market—all suffered incidents that cascaded across dependent platforms. Add to that outages at Cloudflare, Salesforce-owned Slack, Zoom, cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, a ransomware attack on Ingram Micro, and late-year gaming disruptions at Epic Games, and 2025 begins to look like a stress test the internet barely passed.
When one failure breaks everything else
Cloud services today are deeply interconnected. A single glitch at the infrastructure or authentication level can knock out thousands of companies—or millions of users—at once. That pattern played out repeatedly in 2025, particularly when “critical dependencies” such as DNS systems, content delivery networks and login services failed.Downdetector data from the year shows that cloud and platform-level outages were the most disruptive incidents of 2025, dwarfing even major failures in social media or streaming. In many cases, services didn’t go down because their own systems failed, but because something they depended on did.
AWS’ October outage: the biggest of them all
The largest global tech outage of 2025 came in October, when AWS—by far the world’s biggest cloud provider—went down for nearly 15 hours.
The outage, traced to a Domain Name System (DNS) error in AWS’ US-East-1 region in northern Virginia, triggered a cascading failure across services that rely on DynamoDB, AWS’ core cloud database. Applications were suddenly unable to locate the data they needed to function.
The impact was enormous. More than four million users reported issues on Downdetector, while over 1,000 companies—from financial trading platforms and payment services to social media apps and e-commerce websites—were affected. Downdetector logged over 17 million reports globally across AWS and impacted services, making it the single largest outage of the year.
The episode underscored a recurring risk in cloud computing: concentration. When too much of the internet depends on a single region—or a single automated system—failure can spread at internet speed.
A ransomware attack that froze supply chains
Not all outages in 2025 were accidental.
In July, IT distributor Ingram Micro was hit by a ransomware attack that knocked its systems offline for days, disrupting online ordering, billing quotes and license management for thousands of customers worldwide. Core platforms, including its AI-powered distribution system Xvantage and cloud licensing platform Impulse, were taken offline.
The attack was linked to the SafePay cybercrime group, which gained access using leaked VPN credentials. It took nearly six days to fully restore services, highlighting how cyberattacks can trigger outages just as damaging as technical failures—especially when they hit companies embedded deep in global tech supply chains.
Microsoft, Google and the cost of small mistakes
Several of the year’s most disruptive outages were triggered not by hackers, but by configuration errors.
Microsoft Azure suffered a global outage on October 29 after what the company described as an “inadvertent tenant configuration change” in Azure Front Door. The issue caused latency and errors across Entra, Defender, Purview and a wide range of Microsoft 365 and Azure services.
Earlier in the year, Google Cloud experienced a three-hour outage after a new feature in its Service Control system overloaded infrastructure in large regions. More than 70 services were affected, taking down apps like Spotify and Discord. Cloudflare later said some of its own services failed because they relied on Google Cloud-backed storage.
Both incidents showed how, in complex cloud environments, even routine updates can spiral into global disruptions.
When work—and play—came to a halt
Beyond hyperscalers, outages at widely used platforms disrupted everyday work and communication. Slack went down for parts of two days in February after a maintenance action combined with a latent caching defect. Zoom suffered a two-hour outage in April after a domain registration error shut down zoom.us, preventing users from starting or joining meetings.
Gaming, too, emerged as a recurring pressure point.
On Christmas Eve, thousands of Fortnite players across the world found themselves locked out of the game during one of the busiest periods of the year. Login and authentication services failed, leaving users stuck at the sign-in screen across PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Switch and mobile devices. Epic Games later confirmed the issue lay with Epic Online Services, with knock-on effects hitting other titles such as Rocket League and Fall Guys.
The timing added to the frustration. The outage hit during holiday events and limited-time game modes, when player traffic peaks—mirroring an earlier PlayStation Network outage in February that locked players out for more than 24 hours.
In both cases, the failures weren’t about game servers themselves, but about centralized identity and authentication systems—another reminder that modern digital experiences often hinge on invisible backend services.
A fragile but indispensable digital world
As internet performance firm Ookla noted in its 2025 analysis, digital services proved both indispensable and fragile. The year’s largest outages were defined by platform-level disruptions across cloud, gaming and communication services, where single points of failure cascaded across industries and regions.
From banking platforms in Latin America to telecom networks in Europe, from enterprise software in North America to social media and gaming in Asia-Pacific, the outages of 2025 exposed just how much modern life depends on systems most users never see—and rarely question until they stop working.
