Introduction

At ServiceAlert.ai, we monitor over 600 cloud services around the clock. This gives us a unique perspective on the reliability landscape of the cloud ecosystem. Here's what we've observed.

Key Findings

1. No Service Is Immune

Every major cloud provider has experienced incidents. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Cloudflare — all have had outages that affected customers. The question isn't whether your dependencies will have issues, but when and how prepared you'll be.

2. Communication Services Are Most Impactful

When Slack or Teams goes down, it doesn't just affect chat — it disrupts incident response itself. Teams that rely on a single communication tool for coordination find themselves unable to even discuss the outage. This is why redundant communication channels are essential.

3. Cascading Failures Are Common

Many services depend on the same underlying infrastructure. A Cloudflare issue can affect dozens of services simultaneously. An AWS region outage can take down services that aren't even marketed as AWS-dependent.

4. Status Pages Lag Behind Reality

We've observed that official status pages often take 15-30 minutes to acknowledge an issue after it begins. Social media reports frequently surface before official status page updates. This is why ServiceAlert.ai monitors both status pages and social signals.

Most Reliable Service Categories

Based on our monitoring data, here's how service categories rank by reliability:

  • Payment processors — Stripe, PayPal, and Square maintain excellent uptime (these handle money, so reliability is non-negotiable)
  • CDN providers — Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai have built highly redundant networks
  • Auth providers — Okta, Auth0, and 1Password prioritize availability given their critical role

    • Least Reliable Categories

  • AI/ML services — Rapidly scaling services like OpenAI and others frequently experience capacity-related degradation
  • CI/CD pipelines — High-compute services under variable load see more issues
  • Analytics platforms — Data-intensive services with complex pipelines

    • How to Protect Yourself

  • Monitor everything: Use ServiceAlert.ai to track all your dependencies
  • Plan for failure: Build incident response plans for critical services
  • Diversify: Avoid single points of failure where possible
  • Understand your SLA: Know what your uptime guarantees actually mean

    • Conclusion

    Cloud reliability has generally improved over the years, but outages remain a fact of life. The best strategy is preparation: know what you depend on, monitor it in real time, and have a plan for when things go wrong.

    View incident history | Browse all services | Monthly reliability reports