The month of October 2025 brought some curveballs in the technology field, and although it might possibly feel like just a distant memory for many now, the warnings from the sector is that these will happen more and more frequently, going forward, so be prepared for more disruption in the future.

So, in case you missed it …

The first one happened on 20 October when Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down, taking many of the world’s biggest websites and huge chunks of the internet with it. Apparently a malfunction at AWS, the tech giant’s cloud computing division, whose infrastructure underpins millions of large companies’ websites and platforms, caused the whoopsie. Just goes to show that big isn’t always best when it comes to technology.

The second one happened just 10 days later on 30 October when Microsoft internet services had a massive outage with its Azure platform. Thousands of websites around the world were affected.

New Zealand was badly affected by this one – RealMe logins, Parliament’s website, public police sites, Immigration NZ, MBIE, Auckland Transport parking App, the ACC portal, and OneNote to name a few. Medication management software MediMap was also affected. Air Zealand experienced issues affecting flights and resorted to physically printing boarding passes. Kiwi Rail systems went down and even Cook Strait ferry services were affected. Media was also affected with Stuff’s logging-in down. The Press, The Post and the Waikato Times websites were also affected.

New Zealand businesses using Microsoft’s Azure cloud portal had issues accessing Office 365 Suite and a pile of their services crashed including Exchange Online, Teams, Entra, Purview, Power Apps in Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 Apps, Microsoft 365 Apps and Microsoft OneDrive. Azure is also used for trigger, authentication and storage endpoints.

For those working from home or on holiday, Minecraft and Xbox Live were also affected.

While a fix was deployed by Microsoft, services were impacted for hours, and the reality is that the actual fallout from this latest outage will be felt for some time. Productivity for many workers will be at an all-time low as a result too.

A third whoopsie actually happened in between the two mentioned above, on 29 October, but affected fewer people. The ANZ Bank’s mobile app went down and customers had trouble logging in to the bank’s GoMoney and internet banking system. This outage affected thousands of customers, but fortunately eftpos and point of sale transactions were not affected. The bank provided a manual workaround for customers seeking to make urgent transactions and the outage was short-lived.

To quote the BBC in referring to the AWS outage prior to the Microsoft one:

“While outages affecting web platforms and services are nothing new, multiple sites going down in one single outage are somewhat less common - but experts say they are becoming more frequent.

“With much of our lives being online these days, the pressure on cloud services is only increasing all the time, and events like these highlight the fragility of these systems.

“Now the blame game starts as companies start to try and recoup losses from today, says BBC North America technology correspondent Lily Jamali.”

Check out BBC’s additional coverage for more information on what went wrong and why.

In the aftermath of the big AWS outage in October, referred to earlier in this ezine, it seems everyone has an opinion.

According to the BBC …

"What this episode has highlighted is just how interdependent our infrastructure is," said Prof Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey.

"So many online services rely upon third parties for their physical infrastructure, and this shows that problems can occur in even the largest of those third-party providers.

"Small errors, often human made, can have widespread and significant impact."

Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, told the BBC the AWS outage highlighted the power cloud services have over how the internet works.

"There are amazing things about the cloud, it allows you to scale… but if you have an outage like this it can take down a lot of services we rely on."

And Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, told the BBC it was "a bit like a bridge collapsing".

"An essential part of the economy has fallen to pieces," she said.

And with so much of cloud computing relying on Amazon, Microsoft and Google - estimated at around 70% - she said the status quo was "unsustainable".

"Once you have a concentrated supply in a handful of monopoly providers, when something like this falls over, it takes a huge percentage of the economy out with it," she said.

"We should really look at trying to buy more local services, rather than relying on a handful of American monopoly platforms.

"That's a risk to our security, our sovereignty and our economy and we need to look at structural separations to make our markets more resilient to these kind of shocks."

The question of responsibility could well land in the courts.

More than a year after the massive CrowdStrike outage, Delta Airlines is still wrangling with the company to recover more than $500m in losses.

Even after CrowdStrike had fixed the issue, the airline said it had to manually reset 40,000 servers, leading to major flight delays over several days.

As Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, stated, we should really look at trying to buy more local services, rather than relying on a handful of American monopoly platforms.

I wonder what they thought of the Microsoft outage happening on the heels of AWS?

Meanwhile, back at Expert business carried on as usual. We frequently question why so many NZ entities, including most of our government departments, rely on using international companies for their IT hosting and operating systems, when NZ-owned and based Kiwi providers can meet their needs. When will they learn that big isn’t always best? I guess they’ll need to pull their heads out of the sand first – how many more massive outages will it take for them to realise their vulnerability? 

If you seriously care about New Zealand’s economy, New Zealanders’ employment, our country’s general well-being, and if the resilience of your web presence is important to the success of your business, consider using local providers for your IT needs. It makes ‘Buy NZ Made’ more important than ever! Charity really does begin at home.