Although nothing this year reached the level of the December 2021 Amazon Web Services outage in terms of scale, 2022 saw plenty of disruption to cloud use from major vendors such as Google, Oracle and Microsoft and tools including Zoom, Slack and IT Glue.

Configuration errors, record-setting summer heat and even “an act of vandalism” were among the culprits credited by vendors for downing cloud services.

But “compared to on-site hardware, cloud-based infrastructure results in more frequent downtime but with less severity,” according to an October report from IT services provider PhoenixNAP. The company recommends data backups, disaster recovery and similar services to avoid downtime, which can cost thousands of dollars a minute.

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2022’s Biggest Cloud Outages

In an October report, research firm Gartner said that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.7 percent to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) should see the highest end-user spending growth in 2023 at 29.8 percent with IT budgets still susceptible to a down economy and inflationary pressures, according to Gartner.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) should see the most effects from inflation due to staffing challenges and the focus on margin protection, while still achieving more than 15 percent growth each next year, according to Gartner.

Here are some of the biggest cloud outages of 2022.