Key Takeaway
AWS has experienced multiple significant outages, highlighting vulnerabilities in even the most advanced cloud infrastructures. Notable incidents include a 20-hour disruption on Christmas Eve 2012 affecting Netflix, a chaotic outage during December 2021 impacting holiday shopping, and a June 2022 incident disrupting major organizations like The Boston Globe. Microsoft Azure has faced similar issues, including a January 2023 outage affecting Teams and Outlook, and a 19-hour outage in July 2025. These disruptions demonstrate the interconnectedness of modern business systems and the potential compliance risks in regulated sectors, as noted by ESET’s George Foley.
A Recurring Outage Pattern
This is not the first instance of an AWS outage causing significant disruption.
The cloud giant has been at the center of numerous major outages – in 2012 alone, AWS experienced several disruptions, including a 20-hour Christmas Eve outage that resulted in a partial Netflix streaming interruption extending into Christmas Day.
A similarly timed outage struck AWS in December 2021, creating chaos for Amazon customers engaged in last-minute holiday shopping.
Last June, an incident at AWS impacted major organizations such as The Boston Globe and the Associated Press, where an issue with AWS Lambda led to increased error rates across multiple AWS services.
This illustrates that even the most advanced infrastructure at the industry’s leading companies remains vulnerable to failure.
Similar issues have also been observed at Microsoft Azure.
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 it from generating new security certificates on 29 February, instead erroneously jumping to 29 February 2013 — a date that does not exist.
Another Outlook outage in July 2025 lasted 19 hours, leaving millions unable to access their email – highlighting that the costs of downtime extend beyond mere inconvenience, as 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’ ongoing outage.
