Tech Leaderism

When the Cloud Fails

Today's AWS outage reminds us of an uncomfortable truth: our digital systems rests on invisible dependencies. A single misconfiguration, a network disruption or a cascading failure in a major cloud provider can send shockwaves across the globe halting both startups and giants alike.

Critics will point to these incidents as proof that we've become too dependent on centralized infrastructure. Yet, paradoxically, the cloud remains the most reliable option we've ever had. Outages are spectacular because they are rare and amplified by the scale of what they power. Before the cloud, similar failures happened silently in server rooms. Hardware would fail, backups would break and disaster recovery plans often existed only on paper.

Cloud computing didn't eliminate failure, it industrialized resilience. It brought redundancy, automated failover and economies of scale that few individual companies could ever achieve on their own. But also brought systemic risk.

The lesson isn't to abandon the cloud, but to account for failure. Diversify across regions or even providers. Test your backups and assumptions, because reliability isn't a feature of the cloud, it's a discipline.