2025’s news cycle was dominated by geopolitical events, fluctuations in the global economy, and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). However, a surge in widespread, disruptive IT outages – increasingly global in scale and impact – also featured regularly in this year’s news agenda, reports NetScout – a tech company providing network performance, cybersecurity, and observability solutions.

This followed the events of 2024, when isolated incidents escalated into systemic failures, exposing deeply interconnected digital infrastructure and how a single fault can cascade across organisations, industries and borders.

Yet, NetScout asks, did businesses learn anything from this? The scale of high-profile outages that took place across industries in 2025 suggests not. This included:

• Global cloud service providers – firstly Google Cloud in June, followed by AWS, Cloudflare and Microsoft Azure in October and November – suffered major outages this year, taking down critical websites, business applications and online services heavily relied on by organisations worldwide
• In July, as thousands of holidaymakers across the UK prepared to jet off for the summer holidays, an air traffic control outage brought several major UK airports to a standstill³

As the year concludes, Eileen Haggerty, area vice president, product & solutions at NetScount, analysed these outages and explains how organisations can prepare for the growing prevalence and impact of IT outages in 2026 and beyond:

“From an observability perspective, 2025 was marked by a series of major IT outages with far-reaching consequences. No industry was immune to the impacts of unexpected system failures; from technology and transportation to manufacturing and financial services. The significant disruption and inconvenience damaged businesses’ reputation, customer relationships, and bottom-line profitability.”

“2025 has also shown that disruptions can affect any organisation, including the world’s best providers, with the best technology, and systems designed and architected to state-of-the-art levels. While modern applications and connectivity offer great benefits, their interconnected nature means disruptions can be extensive. When they occur, the real test is how quickly businesses can detect, understand and recover.”

“The need for incident readiness processes that – much like fire drills – require regular practice, rehearsal and refinement is critical to ensuring business continuity and operational resilience. True observability – which helps firms understand not just what is broken, but why and where – is essential to greater resiliency, helping organisations limit the impact of unplanned downtime.”

“The abundance of IT outages this year was a harsh lesson for businesses – but also a valuable learning opportunity. Truly resilient organisations turn disruptions into data, creating data sources and blueprints for performance assurance and operational resilience. By capturing actionable insights from previous incidents, firms not only document best practices, but also future-proof operations, ensuring they can anticipate and navigate potential challenges before they affect customers and the business,” concluded Haggerty.

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Tags: AI, cloud, google, NetScout