> 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.