The Good Tech Companies - What the Recent Amazon and Microsoft Cloud Outages Taught the UK Payments Industry

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/what-the-recent-amazon-and-microsoft-cloud-outages-taught-the-uk-payments-industry. AWS and Azure outages in October 2025 exposed deep systemic risks in UK payments. This article examines cloud dependency and how firms can build true resilience Check more stories related to cloud at: https://hackernoon.com/c/cloud. You can also check exclusive content about #cloud-infrastructure, #fintech-and-banking, #cloud-outage-2025, #cloud-resilience, #multi-cloud-architecture, #uk-payments-industry, #amazon-outage-2025, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @noda. Learn more about this writer by checking @noda's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. October 2025’s AWS and Azure outages showed how dependent the UK payments sector is on a small set of cloud providers. The piece unpacks the systemic risks, regulatory concerns, and lessons from blockchain—offering a roadmap for payment firms to build resilient, cloud-agnostic, multi-provider architectures that prioritise continuity over assumed perfect uptime.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. What the recent Amazon and Microsoft cloud outages taught the UK payments industry by Noda. The UK payments industry has long depended on, always-on, cloud infrastructure operated by tech giants such as Amazon Web Services, Oz, and Microsoft Azure. When both suffered major outages this October, they exposed a core vulnerability. The fragility of digital systems built on the assumption that hyperscale cloud, never fail. In this article, Noda's executive advisor Alex Badlin explores what those disruptions taught us about operational dependency, systemic risk in payments, and how forward-looking

businesses can rethink resilience in a cloud-centric world. The wake-up call of autumn 2025, on the 20th October 2025, a WS experienced a large-scale outage, triggered by a DNS-related issue in its U.S. East One region. Just over a week later, on the 29th October 2020, Microsoft Azure suffered a major outage route caused traced to a misconfiguration in its Azure front door, AFD, global routing infrastructure. Although each outage lasted only a few hours, the impact was felt worldwide across a huge number of services. The outages affected not only common global messengers or social media like Snapchat, Slack or Zoom, but also thousands of local UK businesses, including those in retail, public sector and financial services

industries. Among the services disrupted by the AWS outage were Lloyd's Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Coinbase. Thousands of customers of UK banks reported experiencing problems with card payments or accessing their bank accounts. For many CTOs, the outages highlighted the hidden financial exposure behind cloud dependency. Every minute of downtime meant lost transactions, abandoned checkouts, and eroded consumer trust, losses that ripple far beyond IT teams. The Outage is translated into millions in missed revenue opportunities across the UK payments landscape. The lesson here is clear. Resilience should be treated ASA business goal, not just a technical one as it directly affects profitability and customer confidence. Why the UK payments sector was

so exposed, high concentration in a FEW providers the payments industry in the UK is heavily reliant on the major cloud providers. While granular industry-specific data is still emerging for 2025, analysts highlight that the UK public sector alone had awarded a WS.S. 1 pound. 7 billion in contracts since 2016, showing just how deeply embedded the provider is. The wider ecosystem shows that when a major hyperscaler fails, critical services including banking apps, checkouts and routing systems become vulnerable. This concentration risk extends beyond direct cloud usage. Many third-party services that payment providers depend on themselves run on these same cloud

platforms, creating hidden dependencies. Regulatory observations regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority, FCA, and the Bank of England, Bo, have previously raised concerns about concentration risk in cloud infrastructure. Too many firms relying on a small number of large cloud providers poses a systemic risk. The recent AWS and Azure outages crystallize this concern. Lessons from blockchain, a resilience model worth studying, while the payments industry grappled with these outages, there's an instructive lesson from blockchain infrastructure. A few years ago, Ethereum faced a critical bug in one of its client implementations. The network survived because it runs on multiple independent codebases, Gath, Nethermind, Basu, Aragon, and others.

When the compromised client failed, operators simply switched to alternative implementations. No single codebase failure could take down the entire system. This demonstrates a principle the payments industry should take seriously, true resilience requires not just geographic redundancy, but genuine technological diversity at the infrastructure level. How payments firms can apply these lessons. Short-term strategies the immediate opportunity for payment service providers is to design systems that avoid vendor lock-in. This is more achievable now than ever before, but IT requires deliberate architectural choices from the start. Containerization with Kubernetes, building on platforms like Kubernetes allows workloads to run across different cloud providers. Cloud agnostic APIs.

Use tools that work across providers rather than building directly on a WS Lambda or Azure functions. This allows you to deploy the same code across multiple platforms. Multicloud by design, not retrofit. Adding multi-cloud capability after you've built around one provider is expensive and impractical. Design for resilience during the initial architecture phase are planned technology refresh cycles. Active-active deployments run across different providers simultaneously rather than primary backup configurations. This ensures you're always testing your failover capabilities in production. It is important to note that cloud agnostic architectures are much more expensive to build and operate than single-vender solutions. But the cost of downtime during critical payment periods

often dwarfs this investment. Long-term rethinking network dependencies even if your own infrastructure is resilient, the payment networks themselves Swift, MasterCard, Visa, remain potential single points of failure. This is where blockchain infrastructure and stable coins become relevant, not as a technological preference, but as a resilience consideration. Public blockchain networks like Ethereum operate through thousands of independent validators globally with no single operator. Stable coins on these networks provide payment rails that operate independently of traditional cart networks and clearing houses, settling the 24th of July 365. Of course, bank transfers and card payments remain dominant and will continue

Toby for a long time. But as firms undertake multi-year technology refresh cycles, it is increasingly pragmatic to monitor how regulated stable coin rails evolve particularly as frameworks like the EU's mica and the UK's stable coin regulations bring greater clarity. A pragmatic path forward, the October 2025 outages won't be the last, so what should payment firms take away? answer is a shift in mindset. You don't design for no failure. You design for continuity when failure happens. Firms building technology roadmaps around this principle, rather than hoping for perfect uptime, will be the ones maintaining service when others cannot. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn, and publish.