Key Takeaway
AWS has experienced multiple significant outages, highlighting vulnerabilities in even the most advanced infrastructures. Notable incidents include a 20-hour disruption on Christmas Eve 2012 affecting Netflix, a chaotic outage during December 2021’s holiday shopping, and a June 2022 incident impacting major organizations like The Boston Globe. Microsoft Azure has faced similar issues, including a January 2023 outage that disrupted Teams and Outlook. Such downtimes not only cause inconvenience but can also jeopardize compliance in regulated sectors like finance and healthcare, emphasizing the interconnectedness of modern business systems, as noted by ESET’s George Foley.
A Recurring Outage Pattern
This is not the first time an AWS outage has led to significant disruption.
The cloud giant has been at the center of numerous major outages – in 2012 alone, AWS experienced multiple disruptions, including a 20-hour outage on Christmas Eve that resulted in a partial Netflix streaming interruption extending into Christmas Day.
A similarly timed outage affected AWS in December 2021, creating chaos for Amazon customers engaged in last-minute holiday shopping.
Last June, an incident at AWS impacted major organizations, including The Boston Globe and the Associated Press, where a problem with AWS Lambda led to increased error rates across various AWS services.
This illustrates that even the most advanced infrastructure at the industry’s leading companies remains vulnerable to failure.
Similar issues have been observed with Microsoft Azure as well.
In January 2023, a Microsoft Azure outage disrupted Teams, 365, and Outlook due to network issues. Additionally, it encountered a ‘leap year’ bug in 2012, where flawed date-handling logic caused by a coding error prevented the generation of new security certificates on February 29, instead skipping to February 29, 2013 — a date that does not exist.
Another outage in July 2025 affected Outlook for 19 hours, leaving millions unable to access their email – highlighting that the costs of downtime extend beyond mere inconvenience; in regulated sectors like finance and healthcare, such disruptions can compromise audit trails and jeopardize compliance standards.
“When one of the major cloud platforms goes down, it reminds everyone how interconnected modern business systems have become,” says George Foley, Technical Advisor at ESET Ireland, a subsidiary of global software company ESET, regarding AWS’s ongoing outage.
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