Amazon and Google team up to cut the impact of major internet outages

Google, Amazon

After years of competing fiercely in the cloud market, Amazon and Google have quietly taken a major step toward a more resilient internet. The two companies have rolled out a jointly engineered system that allows AWS and Google Cloud to talk to each other far more seamlessly, potentially reducing the scale and severity of future outages.

The timing could not be more relevant. Outages at major infrastructure providers, such as Cloudflare’s recent failure, routinely ripple across finance, retail, logistics, and public services. A single glitch can ground flights, freeze payments, and take down news sites. The new AWS–Google collaboration aims to make those cascading failures less likely.

At the heart of the project is deep interoperability between AWS Interconnect and Google Cloud’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect. According to Google, the system lets customers create private, high-speed links between the two platforms with far more automation and far less manual configuration. The companies have also published a new open networking specification to ensure these links behave consistently.

Amazon, in its own announcement, said that while Google Cloud is the first partner, the architecture will extend to Microsoft Azure in 2026. If successful, this would give enterprises a common fabric across the three biggest cloud providers for the first time.

The business case is obvious. Running workloads across multiple clouds gives companies another safety net when things go wrong. Google explicitly pointed to the resilience benefits: by distributing apps and services across hosts, customers gain extra protection against facility failures, network issues or software bugs. When one cloud stumbles, critical systems could instantly shift to the other, keeping services online.

"We have collaborated on this solution to deliver high resiliency by leveraging quad-redundancy across physically redundant interconnect facilities and routers," said the two companies.

As multi-cloud architectures mature, future outages could have much smaller blast radiuses. For end users, that means fewer broken apps, fewer frustrating error screens and a far more dependable internet.