Google had a pretty bad day recently. The kind of day that would make Spotify stop singing, Discord and Snapchat go quiet, and give retailer Marks & Spencer a panic attack. Why? Because too many companies are leaning on a centralized provider for critical, and often interdependent, business processes.
This Google cloud outage revealed a harsh truth: single cloud vendor reliance can become a systemic risk, triggering widespread contagion across industries and critical services.
Entire industries felt the ripple effects, and not just within Google’s walls. Services like Snapchat also got caught in the digital crossfire, and infrastructure relying on Cloudflare’s services further served to amplify the impact, showing just how intertwined and vulnerable our digital infrastructure has become.
The CrowdStrike incident in July 2024 which crashed millions of Windows operating systems globally, exemplifie…