Key Outage Statistics at a Glance

Every figure below is tied to a named incident report or industry study in the sources list. Durations are as reported by the provider or the monitoring firm cited — see the methodology note for why different trackers sometimes report slightly different numbers for the same incident.

AWS Outage History

AWS’s most consequential outages have repeatedly centered on us-east-1 (Northern Virginia), its oldest and most heavily used region. Below are the major publicly documented incidents from 2020 through 2025.

Durations reflect time to full recovery where reported; some incidents had partial service restored earlier.

Azure Outage History

Azure’s worst incidents have been more evenly spread across regions than AWS’s, with networking, DNS, and power events all recurring causes. One of the most disruptive “Azure” days in its history wasn’t even Azure’s fault — it compounded with an unrelated third-party vendor failure.

Cloudflare Outage History

Because Cloudflare sits in front of such a large share of the web, even short outages tend to be highly visible. Its most talked-about recent incident lasted only a few hours — but reached an unusually large slice of the internet at once.

How the Three Providers Compare

No provider is immune, and each tends to fail in a slightly different way. Here’s the pattern that emerges across the incidents documented above.

Why Cloud Outages Keep Happening

Cloud infrastructure has gotten more reliable over time, not less — but the industry-wide data shows the improvement is slowing, and the nature of failures is shifting.

• Outage frequency per site has declined for five consecutive years industry-wide, though the pace of improvement has slowed compared to previous years.Source: Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026
• Third-party providers — cloud, telecommunications, and colocation companies — now account for roughly two-thirds of all publicly reported outages tracked over the last nine years, reflecting how much of the internet’s infrastructure has consolidated onto a small number of platforms.Source: Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026
• Power infrastructure — UPS systems, transfer switches, and generators — remains the single leading technical cause of data center outages; human error tied to procedural non-compliance is the leading human factor.Source: Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026
• About 1 in 10 organizations describe their most recent outage as having a “serious” or “severe” impact — but 57% of operators in the 2025 survey said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000, and 1 in 5 said it cost more than $1 million, for the second year running.Source: Uptime Institute, 2025 Outage Survey

What This Means If You Depend on One Provider

None of this is a reason to avoid AWS, Azure, or Cloudflare — all three remain far more reliable than running equivalent infrastructure yourself. But the pattern above is consistent: even the largest providers have multi-hour, sometimes multi-day, failures that are completely outside a customer’s control, and a growing share of the internet’s outages now originate at exactly this layer rather than at any individual site or host.

The practical takeaway is about blast radius, not brand loyalty: knowing which of your own services depend on a single region, a single CDN, or a single DNS provider — and having a plan for what happens when that dependency goes down — matters more than picking the “most reliable” provider, since on any given year, that title can change hands.