AWS and Cloudflare Outages: How GitProtect Keeps Your Operations Running

The assumption that you’re ‘too big to fail’ or ‘too small to get noticed’ simply doesn’t hold water anymore. The year 2025 showed us once again that even the largest names on the market are not invincible. The same is true for any company that depends on their infrastructures.

Without a real Plan B, your business’s reliance on cloud tech giants might be risky. What’s more, with cloud providers denying responsibility for your organization’s data on the grounds of the Shared Responsibility Model, your data is exposed and you’re in danger of multiple financial or legal implications.

Learn more about real 2025 outages, discover how downtime may impact your business, and see how to build data sovereignty to protect your money and reputation.

What Actually Happened to Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare in 2025?

To show you that the threat is real, we’ll briefly discuss high-profile examples of recent outages that started with small update or configuration errors to later spiral out of control.

Amazon Web Services: Automation Glitch (October 20, 2025)

Amazon operates a Domain Name Service (DNS). DNS is like an internet phonebook that directs popular apps and services (e.g., Slack or Jira) to Amazon’s cloud services they depend on. Due to the mistiming of automated processes updating the DNS, one of the processes deleted valid entries, which prevented communication.

This was followed by cascading failures across other Amazon services and multiphase recovery, bringing the total service disruption to about 15 hours. In general, the outage affected 3,500 companies worldwide, including the ones such as Zoom, PayPal, Atlassian, Bank of Scotland, and Netflix, to name a few. With the apps/services unavailable to end users, these businesses likely experienced financial losses. 

The bottom line is that even a slight mistiming of under-the-hood processes might escalate to a worldwide paralysis and loss for businesses that depend on a big tech name.

Cloudflare: A Tiny Update Error (November 18, 2025)

Cloudflare acts like a guard for countless websites around the world, checking if a visitor is a human or a malicious bot, for example. To this end, it uses a special checklist. Due to a flawed update of one parameter, the checklist grew double in size, causing the Cloudflare service to eventually stop working.

As a result, every 1 in 5 webpages was globally affected (unavailable), including the highly popular apps/services like X, ChatGPT, McDonalds, Jira, and 1Password. Again, this 6-hour outage resulted in financial and other types of loss for the affected brands.

To sum up, even the smallest glitch during regular software maintenance can have a serious impact.

More Evidence? Google Cloud Platform and Azure Outages from 2025

If you still think that public cloud outages are a rarity, here come 2 more examples from the very same year 2025.

On June 12, 2025, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and the platform-dependent services, like Spotify and Fitbit, experienced a nearly 3-hour downtime. Again, automation was the culprit. An automated update broke the system that controls interactions between downstream vendor apps and GCP (the so-called API management system). The result was that end users experienced a range of errors, being unable to access specific app resources or simply launch the affected apps.

On October 30, 2025, Microsoft’s Azure and 365 services experienced an outage, with users reporting problems with accessing sites and services running on Microsoft’s products. The possible cause of the outage was an ‘inadvertent configuration change’. The outage resulted in service unavailability for multiple businesses, including Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines.

The story does not end here. If you want to read more about downtime incidents of popular Git hosting services (e.g., GitHub, Bitbucket, Jira), be sure to study our CISO’s Guide to DevOps Threats.

The High Price of Cloud Dependency for Your Organization

Cloud outages don’t mean serious problems only for the affected providers or some ‘intangible’ worldwide issues that look impressive when presented as numbers. They may actually mean trouble for your business. In many respects.

Unnecessary Costs and Loss: Downtime as a Budget Killer

When you solely depend on a cloud provider, and it experiences an outage, it means downtime for your organization, too. In turn, when your organization can’t operate, you don’t just stop making money, you start losing it in other ways:

• Missed business opportunities—potential customers leave your ‘unresponsive’ or unavailable website/app, don’t trial your product, etc.
• Idle labor—you’re paying for peak performance but getting zero output.
• Non-tangible loss—it’s difficult to estimate the cost of lost trust and customers turning their backs on you, but it can be high, especially when you’re still building your brand.
• Legal penalties—you may lose money based on Service Level Agreement (SLA) claims or through failing to meet the data availability requirements defined by industry standards or regulations.

These are just examples of what may contribute to your total downtime cost. And the price tag is staggering. You can easily find data and stats that back up high and rising cost of service unavailability. For example, Information Technology Intelligence Consulting survey claims that the cost of hourly downtime is now more than $300,000 for 90% of mid-size and large firms. Or, from the Uptime Institute’s Annual outage analysis 2024, you can learn that over 50% of the responders admitted that the latest serious outage cost their company over $100,000, while 16% cited the amount of more than $1 million. According to our blog article on the top 30 cybersecurity statistics, 46% of organizations experienced an outage or service disruption in 2025 because of cyber attacks. In other words, downtime affected nearly 1 in 2 organizations, so the odds are really high!

Operational Chaos

The chaos that follows an outage is mainly related to stalled production. For example, if Jira is down, your business workflow suffers from operational paralysis, and so does your employees’ productivity. If you work with code and heavily leverage a cloud DevOps platform that experiences downtime, you won’t be able to publish a new app update, complete a major release, and so on.

If you’re unsure whether you have backup copies letting you switch the production to a local environment or an alternative cloud service provider, you’re likely to end up scrambling to locate backups. Having a robust backup solution and clearly defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) metrics in place may turn invaluable on such occasions.

Undermined Reputation: Customer Trust and SLAs

An upstream service provider outage might impact your brand’s image. A long-awaited and widely communicated project completion failure? Inability to fix a critical bug for end users of your app? There are many more scenarios when you can easily break the trust of your customers, partners, or shareholders alike.

The situation gets more complicated when you fail to meet obligations under some sort of Service Level Agreement (SLA). For example, failing to fix a bug within a fixed timeframe might result in legal and financial consequences, too.

Shadow IT and Security Implications

When the official ways to work don’t work, the unofficial ones will do – that’s the approach your employees may take. Sending credentials over Slack or emailing your proprietary code aren’t just bad habits—they are security backdoors. 

Shadow IT, the umbrella term for using unsanctioned software or workarounds without IT oversight (during a provider failure), doesn’t only come at the cost of data or intellectual property (IP) leaks. It may have serious repercussions in the future, for example, when your business suddenly becomes a victim of a ransomware attack.

Compliance Risks

Finally, there are compliance-related risks that may threaten your organization not only in terms of law but also finances. Incidents may expose missing or insufficient means to ensure business continuity, data availability, etc. under GDPR, NIS2, or SOC2. As a result, you risk extra audits or even penalties imposed by supervisory authorities.

Why Can GitProtect Be Your Data Insurance Against Cloud Outages?

Data is key for contemporary businesses. GitProtect.io, as a backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution, shields your most precious digital assets and brings you true independence from external factors. Here’s why.

How GitProtect Brings Independence to Your Data

Let’s reiterate: data is a critical business asset for modern organizations like yours. Whether it is available to you at all times and you can freely manage it is crucial. This is precisely what GitProtect can do for you.

First of all, with GitProtect, you can easily make full and faithful copies of your entire DevOps, Jira, and Microsoft 365 ecosystems. With the widest support for DevOps data types on the market, you can be sure you’ll restore your environment 1:1 under the pressure of a disaster.

GitProtect supports multiple storage options to accommodate your backups. To gain 100% independence, you can keep copies locally, on your premises. To prepare for any circumstances, use our solution to replicate the copies to multiple destinations like private or public clouds, following the best backup practices (like the 3-2-1-1-0 rule) and enjoying the latest security technologies like data immutability or isolation.

Thanks to multi-platform and cross-platform migration support, in the event of an outage, you can ad hoc migrate your production data from one cloud provider to another; or restore your data to a local, self-managed version of a popular cloud platform, e.g., GitHub Enterprise Server (for GitHub Cloud), to resume when an outage isn’t over yet and stop losing.

How Is Independence Built Into GitProtect.io

GitProtect.io provides immunity to outages in public clouds by design. You can deploy it 100% locally. If you want a version where we manage updates for you, you can choose the version that works on our own private cloud that’s independent of tech giants.

When you combine local GitProtect deployment with a 100% local storage, you (and your data) can become fully independent of external providers, internet connectivity, and… outages.

Build Sovereign Ecosystem with GitProtect

As you can see, building a completely sovereign downtime-free setup with GitProtect is possible. In the times of more and more frequent & vicious AI-based attacks, ransomware, and highly complex infrastructures, such a setup brings your data resilience to a completely new level. With it, you can continue production and avoid loss, even when half of the Internet is down.

GitProtect draws on our extensive experience in the backup industry, dating back to 2009. The product is developed with security by default and by design principles, which is confirmed by our ongoing SOC2 Type II attestation and ISO 27001 certification. If you want to build a fully sovereign ecosystem for your business-critical data, feel free to visit the product’s website, take a look around, and trial GitProtect.io for 14 days for free. We also encourage you to reach out to our experts who can help you choose the best plan and customize GitProtect deployment to the very needs of your business.