{"id":112823,"date":"2026-03-10T09:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T16:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/?p=112823"},"modified":"2026-03-10T09:48:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T16:48:11","slug":"how-neocloud-alliances-reduce-the-internets-largest-single-point-of-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/how-neocloud-alliances-reduce-the-internets-largest-single-point-of-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"How Neocloud Alliances Reduce the Internet\u2019s Largest Single Point of Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When AWS’s us-east-1 region went down for over 15 hours on October 20, 2025<\/a>, the cascade of failures exposed just how fragile the internet’s infrastructure has become. Major services like Discord, Slack, Atlassian, and parts of Netflix suddenly went dark. These companies weren’t all direct AWS customers, but the vendors they relied on were. Authentication systems failed. CDNs stopped responding. Monitoring tools went blind. Companies that thought they’d diversified their cloud strategy discovered their backups were just as offline as their primary systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was far from an isolated incident. CrowdStrike’s faulty update<\/a> took down 8.5 million Windows machines in July 2024. Microsoft Azure<\/a> suffered multiple regional outages throughout 2024 and 2025 affecting Office 365, Teams, and Azure DevOps. The pattern is clear: As more of the internet’s critical infrastructure consolidates onto a handful of hyperscale providers<\/a>, the blast radius of any single failure grows exponentially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solutions organizations thought they’d implemented, like multi-cloud deployments, redundant architectures, and disaster recovery plans, often provide little more than the illusion of protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The illusion of diversification<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A company migrates its primary compute workload from AWS to Google Cloud or Azure, checks the “multi-cloud” box, and considers the job done. But authentication still runs through AWS Cognito. The CDN is CloudFront. Monitoring lives in CloudWatch. DNS resolution depends on Route 53. When AWS’s control plane fails, the entire architecture collapses regardless of where the compute actually runs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ThousandEyes<\/a> documented exactly this pattern during the October 2025 AWS outage. Packet loss and routing instability affected direct AWS customers and cascaded into dependent networks and services that appeared independent on paper, but shared the same regional infrastructure under the hood. Organizations often discover these dependencies only during outages, when it’s too late to do anything about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why concentration accelerates despite known risks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Everyone knows concentration is dangerous, yet it keeps accelerating. The same forces that make hyperscalers attractive\u2014operational simplicity, unified tooling, procurement efficiency\u2014concentrate risk faster than diversification efforts can mitigate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teams often adopt unified tooling for operational simplicity, which reduces integration costs and builds vendor-specific expertise. As more systems integrate with that tooling, switching costs increase. Eventually, the platform becomes the default rather than a choice. Each new service added to the stack makes it harder to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hyperscaler architecture isn’t just a risk, it’s a cost<\/h4>\n

Amplify’s<\/a> AWS egress fees were growing to 10x their storage costs as customers downloaded more datasets. CTO Ameya Pathare evaluated Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, and Wasabi before building a modular architecture: Snowflake for data transformation and Backblaze B2 for staging, with outputs available across Google BigQuery and Tableau.<\/p>\n\n

The two-week migration with zero downtime delivered 70% cost savings that compound with every download. When individual providers experience issues, customers maintain access through alternative paths. “If we had stayed on AWS, we’d have needed to change our pricing and pass on those egress fees to the customer,” Pathare says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Diversification efforts lag behind because they require deliberate architectural decisions that run counter to operational efficiency. According to the CNCF’s 2025 State of Cloud report<\/a>, 30% of organizations deploy to hybrid cloud environments and 23% to multi-cloud. That sounds encouraging until you look at what they’re actually distributing. Most organizations spread their compute across providers while consolidating authentication, orchestration, and monitoring with a single vendor. Deployment location differs from dependency structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gartner projects<\/a> that 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid cloud approaches by 2027. But without intentional failure domain separation, these deployments maintain the same concentrated dependencies they’re meant to avoid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why untested recovery paths fail<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Most organizations treat failover mechanisms like insurance policies: pay the premium, file the documentation, and hope you never need to use it. Then an outage hits and they discover their recovery paths don’t actually work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google’s SRE team<\/a> analyzed this pattern in their twenty-year retrospective: “Recovery mechanisms that are not tested before an incident routinely fail when they are needed most.” Configuration drift makes systems behave differently in production than they did in testing. Teams encounter unfamiliar tooling under pressure. Communication systems fail because they rely on the same infrastructure that’s down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three practices separate resilient systems from brittle ones:<\/p>\n\n\n\n