Cloud outages, infrastructure risk, and the domino effect: why redundancy is critical for resilience
Major cloud outages at AWS and Microsoft (just this week and month in 2025) exposed the fragility of digital infrastructure. This article explores the domino effect of service disruptions, highlights the economic cost, and explains why building in redundancy, both physical and virtual, is essential for business resilience.
Digital businesses depend on cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft for critical operations. Recent outages have highlighted just how quickly things fall apart when infrastructure fails and redundancy isn’t built in. When one piece of infrastructure, such as a data center, network node, or power supply, goes down, cloud services built on it can fail instantly.
Critical software built on these platforms is affected, and this disruption can cascade through supply chains, customer interactions, and even public services.
Without strong geographic and hardware redundancy, what starts as a local issue can rapidly become a worldwide crisis, kicking off a powerful domino effect.
The most recent AWS 2025 Virginia outage cost $100 million+ in downtime, taking down Snapchat, Coinbase and hundreds of other businesses
Lost revenue, reputational damage, and operational downtime affect industries from finance and healthcare to retail and logistics.
As AI and cloud dependency deepen, the stakes get higher every year.
Best Practices:
Multi-cloud deployment: Spread critical workloads across multiple providers and regions.
Physical redundancy: Invest in backup power, network routes, and diverse hardware.
Routine failover testing and audits: Ensure both software and physical infrastructure redundancy actually work.
Recovery objectives: Track metrics like Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) alongside traditional SLAs.
Leader Tip:
Businesses that survived the 2025 outages best had physical and geographic diversity and tested their failovers proactively.
Q: What causes major cloud outages?
A: Events like equipment failures, misconfigured networking, or power outages can quickly cascade across cloud infrastructure, resulting in global service disruption.
Q: How do outages create a domino effect?
A: When a key infrastructure node fails, dependent services and apps are impacted, triggering problems throughout entire digital ecosystems.
Q: What is redundancy, and why does it matter?
A: Redundancy means duplicating critical systems, geographically, physically, and digitally, to ensure continuity when failures occur.
Q: How much do these outages cost businesses?
A: Industry data from 2025 shows most (60% or more) cloud outages cost at least $100 million in direct and indirect losses.
Q: What steps should companies take to improve resilience?
A: Multi-cloud architecture, physical backups, diverse networking routes, hardware diversity, and regular failover drills are key.
Cloud outages are not a matter of "if," but "when."
Outages trigger a domino effect through critical software and infrastructure, with major economic consequences. The only solution is a layered approach to redundancy, physical and digital, proactively tested and maintained.
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