I have a serious question, not trying to start a flame war.

A. Are these major issues with cloud/SaaS tools becoming more common, or is it just that they get a lot more coverage now? It seems like we see major issues across AWS, GCP, Azure, Github, etc. at least monthly now and I don't remember that being the case in the past.

B. If it's becoming more common, what are the reasons? I can think of a few, but I don't know the answer, so if anyone in-the-know has insight I'd appreciate it.

Operations budget cuts/layoffs? Replacing critical components/workflows with AI? Just overall growing pains, where a service has outgrown what it was engineered for?

Thanks

> A. Are these major issues with cloud/SaaS tools becoming more common, or is it just that they get a lot more coverage now? It seems like we see major issues across AWS, GCP, Azure, Github, etc. at least monthly now and I don't remember that being the case in the past.

FWIW Microsoft is convinced moving Github to Azure will fix these outages

Been on GitHub for a long time. It feels like they're more often. It used to be yearly if at all that GitHub was noticably impacted. Now it's monthly, and recently, seemingly weekly.

> If it's becoming more common, what are the reasons?

Someone answered this morning, while Cloudflare outage, it's AI vibe coding and I tend to think there is something true in this. At some point there might be some tiny grain of AI engaged which starts the avalanche ending like this.

well layoffs across tech probably havent helped

https://techrights.org/n/2025/08/12/Microsoft_Can_Now_Stop_R...

ever since Musk greenlighted firing people again.. CEOs can't wait to pull the trigger

It certainly feels that way, though it may be an instance of availability bias. Not sure what's causing it - maybe extra load from AI bots (certainly a lot of smaller sites complain about it, maybe major providers feel the pain too), maybe some kind of general quality erosion... It's certainly something that is waiting for a serious research.

Years ago on hackernews I saw a link about probability describing a statistical technique that one could use to answer a question about if a specific type of event was becoming more common or not. Maybe related to the birthday paradox? The gist that I remember is that sometimes a rare event will seem to be happening more often, when in reality there is some cognitive bias that makes it non-intuitive to make that decision without running the numbers. I think it was a blog post that went through a few different examples, and maybe only one of them was actually happening more often.

Github isn't in the same reliability class as the hyperscalars or cloudflare; its comically bad now, to the point that at a previous job we invested in building a readonly cache layer specifically to prevent github outages from bringing our system down.

End of year, pre-holiday break, code/project completion for perf review rush.

Be good to your Stability reliability engineers for the next few months... it's downtime season!

I’m more interested in how this and the Cloudflare outage occurred on the same day. Is it really just a coincidence?

> Are these major issues with cloud/SaaS tools becoming more common, or is it just that they get a lot more coverage now?

I think that "more coverage" is part of it, but also "more centralization." More and more of the web is centralized around a tiny number of cloud providers, because it's just extremely time-intensive and cost-prohibitive for all but the largest and most specialized companies to run their own datacenters and servers.

Three specific examples: Netflix and Dropbox do run their own datacenters and servers; Strava runs on AWS.

> If it's becoming more common, what are the reasons? I can think of a few, but I don't know the answer, so if anyone in-the-know has insight I'd appreciate it.

I worked at AWS from 2020-2024, and saw several of these outages so I guess I'm "in the know."

My somewhat-cynical take is that a lot of these services have grown enormously in complexity, far outstripping the ability of their staff to understand them or maintain them:

- The OG developers of most of these cloud services have moved on. Knowledge transfer within AWS is generally very poor, because it's not incentivized, and has gotten worse due to remote work and geographic dispersion of service teams.

- Managers at AWS are heavily incentivized to develop "new features" and not to improve the reliability, or even security, of their existing offerings. (I discovered numerous security vulnerabilities in the very-well-known service that I worked for, and was regularly punished-rather-than-rewarded for trying to get attention and resources on this. It was a big part of what drove me to leave Amazon. I'm still sitting on a big pile of zero-day vulnerabilities in ______ and ______.)

- Cloud services in most of the world are basically a 3-way oligopoly between AWS, Microsoft/Azure, and Google. The costs of switching from one provider to another are often ENORMOUS due to a zillion fiddly little differences and behavior quirks ("bugs"). It's not apparent to laypeople — or even to me — that any of these providers are much more or less reliable than the others.

I suspect there is more tech out there. 20 years ago we didn't have smartphones. 10 years ago, 20mbit on mobile was a good connection. Gigabit is common now, infrastructure no longer has the hurdles it used to, AI makes coding and design much easier, phones are ubiquitous and usage of them at all times (in the movies, out and dinner, driving) has become super normalised.

I suspect (although have not researched) that global traffic is up, by throughput but also by session count.

This contributes to a lot more awareness. Slack being down wasn't impactful when most tech companies didn't use Slack. An AWS outage was less relevant when the 10 apps (used to be websites) you use most didn't rely on a single AZ in AWS or you were on your phone less.

I think as a society it just has more impact than it used to.

Looking around, I noticed that many senior, experienced individuals were laid off, sometimes replaced by juniors/contractors without institutional knowledge or experience. That's especially evident in ops/support, where the management believes those departments should have a smaller budget.

1/ Most of the big corporations moved to big cloud providers in the last 5 years. Most of them started 10 years ago but it really accelerated in the last 5 years. So there is for sure more weight and complexity on cloud providers, and more impact when something goes wrong.

2/ Then we cannot expect big tech to stay as sharp as in the 2000s and 2010s.

There was a time banks had all the smart people, then the telco had them, etc. But people get older, too comfortable, layers of bad incentive and politics accumulate and you just become a dysfunctional big mess.

> B. If it's becoming more common, what are the reasons?

Among other mentioned factors like AI and layoffs: mass brain damage caused by never-ending COVID re-infections.

Since vaccines don't prevent transmission, and each re-infection increases the chances of long COVID complications, the only real protection right now is wearing a proper respirator everywhere you go, and basically nobody is doing that anymore.

There are tons of studies to back this line of reasoning.

I think it's cancer, and it's getting worse.

One possibility is increased monitoring. In the past, issues that happened weren't reported because they went under the radar. Whereas now, those same issues which only impact a small percentage of users would still result in a status update and postmortem. But take this with a grain of salt because it's just a theory and doesn't reflect any actual data.

A lot of people are pointing to AI vibe coding as the cause, but I think more often than not, incidents happen due to poor maintenance of legacy code. But I guess this may be changing soon as AI written code starts to become "legacy" faster than regular code.