Cloud service interruption events among the “big three” cloud providers happened more often and lasted much longer in 2023 than the year prior, according to Managing Cloud Outage Risk: Cloud Downtime in 2023, the latest annual cloud outage report from Parametrix, the leading provider of cloud monitoring, modeling, and insurance services.
The total number of events of all severities observed by the firm’s proprietary Parametrix Cloud Monitoring System (PCMS) increased by 43% to 638 during the year. The number of “Critical” interruptions – the most severe events – increased by 38%, and their total duration rose from 133.5 hours to 205.3 hours. Six of these critical event outages lasted more than ten hours, and three exceeded 20 hours. Interruptions of MS Azure services accounted for the bulk of downtime, while Amazon Web Services proved the most reliable of the big three.
The majority of events by number and duration happened in North America, but major Critical interruptions also occurred in European, Asian, and Rest of World regions.
Monitoring by Parametrix is incredibly granular, allowing determination of the specific types of services (like “compute” or “storage”) which may not function at a given moment. PCMS is therefore able to report on the total duration of lost functionality of different service types during an outage. Compute functions were offline for 134.6 hours during the 40 Critical interruptions, the longest of any service type., but a Aggregate unavailability of all service types increased 54% in 2023.
“This year’s data reveals stark truths: severe cloud outage events were more numerous in 2023, and they lasted much longer,” said Yonatan Hatzor, co-founder and CEO of Parametrix. “This highlights the clear need for cloud-dependent companies to take effective risk-transfer measures, and for insurers to manage the potential downtime disasters which may be accumulating undetected against their balance sheets. That’s what we’re here for.”
About Parametrix
Parametrix, the leading provider of digital business interruption solutions, specializes in parametric insurance that protects against the financial cost of technology and digital infrastructure downtime. Leveraging a proprietary network of monitoring systems, we collect and analyze real-time, granular data on the performance and availability of critical infrastructure— including data centers, SaaS providers, and cloud services— to accurately assess risk and deliver fast, transparent claims payments. Our solutions enable businesses, data center stakeholders, and (re)insurers to quantify, manage, and transfer the financial risks of downtime with unmatched precision. Parametrix is a Managing General Agent and Lloyd’s Coverholder, with policies backed by major A-rated global insurers, and is headquartered in New York.
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