Forrester is predicting at least two major multi-day cloud outages this year

Forrester's Predictions 2026: Cloud Computing report makes an unusually specific forecast for an analyst firm: at least two major multi-day outages across the big three hyperscalers this year, driven by a real trade-off those companies are making — prioritizing AI infrastructure buildout over maintenance of aging legacy systems that still run the rest of the internet.

The 2025 outages weren't a warning that got ignored, they were the preview. One of the largest, an AWS incident, generated more than 17 million Downdetector reports and lasted over 15 hours, per TechTarget's reporting. Azure, Google Cloud, and Cloudflare all had their own significant incidents the same year — and 2026 has already added a Cloudflare-linked disruption in June that took down Teams, Zoom, X, and several other unrelated services simultaneously, a reminder of how much of the internet sits behind a small number of shared infrastructure providers.

The response showing up across enterprise IT isn't “pick a more reliable cloud” — reliability is genuinely comparable across the major providers — it's architectural. Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud data found 92% of enterprises now use multiple cloud providers, though the report is careful to note that most of that is accidental multi-cloud (different teams, different tools, no coordination) rather than deliberate redundancy.

For a smaller business without the budget for genuine multi-cloud redundancy, the more realistic version of this lesson is narrower: know which of your business-critical functions depend entirely on one vendor's uptime, and have an actual fallback communication channel — not just a hope — for the day that vendor has a bad one.