Are Service Provider Outages Down in 2025?

There have not been many well-publicized ISP and cloud outages so far this year.   Although there was a newsworthy Google outage last month, 2025 has not seen anything like the worldwide, multi-billion dollar CrowdStrike glitch of July, 2024.  Does that mean you have nothing to worry about?   

Of course not.  Outages are definitely happening, and there is no likelihood of service interruptions being eliminated but based on preliminary data it appears that service providers are proving to be more reliable so far in 2025 than they were in 2024. 

Cisco’s ThousandEyes monitoring service serves at the source for the invaluable 2025 Global Network Outage Report put together weekly by Ann Bednarz, an Executive Editor at Network World.  Tallying up the weekly reports over the first six months of the year it appears that the frequency of outages is down in the neighborhood of 30% from last year.  

While the trend is impressive, there have still been over 3000 provider outages in the US alone in the first half of 2025.  That is not a small number.  And remember, these are not individual company outages, they are provider outages that cause downstream downtime for customers.  For example, a single outage for Google Cloud Platform can affect over 950,000 business customers. So, a multiplier likely needs to be attached to the provider outages.  

Be prepared: While it’s good that the providers look like they are having a better year, the outage numbers are still substantial, and it is likely that hundreds of thousands of businesses have been affected by them in 2025. 

Preparing for the worst is still critical for IT executives. Having a well-thought-out disaster recovery and business continuity plan protects you and your customers from downtime, to say nothing of the marketplace reputation for all involved.  

It is a best practice to be constantly vigilant in avoiding risk while reviewing your DR and business continuity plans to make sure they pass muster. For additional ideas download the Direct LTx executive report Maintaining High Availability: 9 Critical Steps to Take for Disaster Recovery Successby clicking here.