2025: When Tech Failed—and AI Changed Everything

In 2025, digital services became more essential than ever—and more fragile.  

Millions of users worldwide were disrupted as major platforms went offline, exposing the risks of relying on a small number of cloud providers, telecom networks, and content delivery systems. 
 
Centralised infrastructure repeatedly emerged as a single point of failure, magnifying the impact of outages.
 
The largest incident hit Amazon Web Services on October 20, triggering over 17 million Downdetector reports. 
 
A DNS management failure linked to DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region caused a 15-hour outage that rippled across dependent services like Snapchat and Netflix next. 
 
PlayStation Network went dark on February 7, locking players out for over 24 hours and generating 3.9 million reports—an internal failure, not cloud-related. 
 
In November, Cloudflare suffered a near five-hour global disruption affecting countless websites and APIs.
 
Regional failures compounded the year: Vodafone faced a UK-wide outage; WhatsApp, Verizon, and Spotify each suffered high-impact disruptions.

 
Meanwhile, AI reshaped the tech economy. A rush by OpenAI, xAI, and Meta to build AI data centers drove up prices for RAM, GPUs, and storage.
 
With Micron pivoting toward data centers, consumers felt the squeeze. 
 
As 2026 has approached, one lesson is clear: resilience must keep pace with AI-driven scale.