Azure’s Bad Night Fuels Fresh Calls For Cloud Diversification In Europe

As Azure staggers back to its feet following an hours-long outage last night, British and European businesses are questioning their reliance on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.

UK retailers Asda and Marks & Spencer were among those affected, as was Dutch Railways, with the group’s online travel planner and ticket purchasing systems reportedly knocked sideways.

According to Microsoft, the cause was “an inadvertent tenant configuration change within Azure Front Door (AFD)” that affected both Microsoft services and customer applications. The impact began at 15:45 UTC, with mitigation confirmed by midnight.

The end-of-day timing minimized disruption, but organizations relying on Azure still faced hours of scrambling to restore services.

Lisa Webb, a consumer law expert for Which?, said: “Large-scale outages underline how dependent everyday life has become on tech providers. With services from airports and supermarkets to banks and communications networks relying on Microsoft’s systems, millions of people could be affected.

“For consumers, this could mean being unable to make payments, access important accounts, or complete time-sensitive tasks, problems that can quickly lead to missed bills, overdraft charges, or other financial knock-on effects.”

With both AWS and Azure suffering major failures recently, organizations will be taking a close look at their dependencies.

Nicky Stewart, Senior Advisor to the Open Cloud Coalition – which counts Google as a backer – said the outage, “highlights the systemic risk of Europe’s dependence on the two dominant cloud providers. Successive outages on this scale show how a single technical fault can ripple through essential services, public infrastructure, and the wider economy.”

Repeated disruption underscores the need for diversification, she added, urging the UK’s competition regulator to introduce rememdies that help create a “more open, competitive, and interoperable cloud market.”

Mark Boost, CEO of Civo,questioned why UK institutions rely on infrastructure “hosted thousands of miles away,” noting that “the real systemic risk is fragility caused by concentration.” He urged policymakers to “rethink procurement, fund sovereign alternatives, and make resilience a baseline requirement.”

Events of the past week highlighted that “resilience cannot come from dependency”, he said, pressing for a domestically governed cloud strategy.

Matthew Hodgson, CEO of the Element communications platform, called for governments to rethink their infrastructure strategies.

“The trouble with big centralized systems,” he said, “be it Microsoft Azure, AWS, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Slack or Zoom, is that they suffer global outages because they have single points of failure. True resilience comes from decentralization and self-hosting.”

The back-to-back failures from Microsoft and AWS have made the case for cloud diversification less possible to ignore. ®

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