No tech company, big or small, can guarantee 100% uptime for their online services. With factors like environmental damage and human error always in play, it’s simply not possible for an Internet-reliant business to always be available. Even something as simple as scheduled maintenance can knock out Internet service for a potentially long amount of time. Unfortunately, these outages can happen at any time and disable a large amount of the service – or potentially the entire thing. It’s annoying for both the providers who need to fix it and the users who rely on the service.

This is true for cloud providers as well. When part of a cloud provider’s infrastructure goes down, it affects the entirety of their userbase. Because many cloud providers, like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, offer multiple services through their cloud platform, outages can vary wildly in terms of size and effect. Some outages might only affect a handle of cloud services. Others might bring down the entire system.

In the last few months a number of public cloud outages have raised the question of whether the cloud is reliable enough to run business-critical environments.