When the Cloud sneezes: why outages hit emerging markets harder

Details: Manny Pham; Category: Cloud & Virtualisation; 14 January 2026; 9951 views

When major cloud and internet platforms suffer outages, the disruption often appears global. Websites go dark, applications stall and social media fills with complaints. But beneath the surface, the impact is far from evenly distributed. In developing and emerging markets, the same technical failure can ripple more deeply - exposing structural weaknesses in how the global internet is built, routed and governed.

Recent outages affecting services linked to AWS and Cloudflare have once again highlighted how concentrated much of the world’s digital infrastructure has become. While hyperscale cloud platforms and content delivery networks (CDNs) have spent years building resilience, the growing reliance on a small number of providers - and a handful of cloud regions - is creating a new form of systemic risk, particularly for countries on the periphery of the global internet.

Concentration is the real vulnerability

According to Franco Chiam, VP for Cloud, Datacentre, Telecommunication and Infrastructure Research at IDC Asia/Pacific, outages at hyperscalers are not a sign that cloud infrastructure is inherently unreliable. Rather, they are an inevitable by-product of systems built to scale at extraordinary complexity.

“Technologies are built for resilience and scale, but like any infrastructure, failures will happen,” Chiam explains. “What these incidents reveal is not that the cloud is broken, but that many enterprises are overly reliant on a single provider or a single region.”

In Asia Pacific and other emerging markets, that reliance is often magnified. Many countries do not have local cloud regions, forcing enterprises to host workloads in hubs such as Singapore, Tokyo, Dubai or Frankfurt. When something goes wrong in those locations - whether due to software bugs, configuration errors or automation failures - the blast radius can extend across entire regions.

Chiam notes that many recent outages were not caused by physical infrastructure failures but by software-level issues, often linked to databases or automated systems. “With so much reliance on data infrastructure, a bug in a database can cascade very quickly,” he says. “Automation is powerful, but if something goes wrong, it’s like pressing a nuclear button.”

The hidden giants of the internet

From a network perspective, the problem is compounded by consolidation within the CDN and application security market. Tony O’Sullivan, CEO of backbone operator RETN, points to Cloudflare as a prime example of a company whose scale is not always visible to end users.

“Cloudflare is the hidden giant behind the internet,” O’Sullivan says. “Most people have never heard of them, but an enormous number of services depend on them. When market share aggregates to that degree, outages stop being isolated incidents and start becoming systemic events.”

Cloudflare’s dominance stems from its early focus on application security and uptime, rather than pure content delivery. While competitors such as Akamai approached the market from a bulk content perspective, Cloudflare embedded itself deeply into the operational fabric of modern web services. The result is that many enterprises have effectively placed all their eggs in one basket.

“Nobody can guarantee 100% uptime,” O’Sullivan adds. “If you want resilience, you have to diversify - just like on the network side. Using a single CDN or cloud provider is fundamentally the wrong design approach.”

Distance, latency and risk

For emerging markets, dependence on distant cloud regions introduces additional layers of vulnerability. Traffic must traverse long international routes, often over a limited number of subsea cables or terrestrial paths. While the global internet will usually find a way to deliver packets, the route taken may be far from optimal.

“We’ve seen traffic between Asia and Europe rerouted via the US or even Australia during major fibre disruptions,” O’Sullivan explains. “If you’re running latency-sensitive applications, that’s a serious problem.”

This is where backbone design, path diversity and traffic engineering become critical. In regions such as Central Asia, parts of Africa or island nations in Southeast Asia, limited physical routes can create “digital island” effects. A single cable cut or congestion point can disproportionately affect entire countries.

Even where multiple cables exist, economics can undermine resilience. Cheaper routes often carry the bulk of traffic, leading to congestion and risk concentration. “The diversity exists on paper,” O’Sullivan says, “but not always in practice.”

Emerging markets feel the impact differently

Not all outages affect emerging markets more severely - but when they do, the consequences can be broader. Chiam points out that digital-native businesses, fintech platforms and government services are often the most exposed.

“Many startups and digital-native businesses rely heavily on a single cloud provider because it’s fast and cost-effective,” he says. “They often don’t have fully tested disaster recovery plans. When an outage happens, the impact is immediate.”

As economies digitise, cloud downtime increasingly translates into economic disruption. Mobile payments fail, logistics platforms stall and access to public services can be temporarily lost. While mature markets may have alternative providers, redundant architectures or local cloud options, developing economies often do not.

“The issue isn’t just technical,” Chiam adds. “It’s organisational. Enterprises need to align their business strategy with their technology strategy. Resilience has to be designed in from the start.”

Sovereignty and local control

These dynamics are driving renewed interest in data sovereignty and local infrastructure. Governments across emerging markets are pushing for local data centres, sovereign cloud initiatives and stronger regulatory oversight of where data resides.

According to O’Sullivan, this is less about nationalism and more about accountability. “When your health records, tax data and government services are fully digitised, data becomes a sovereign asset,” he says. “People want to know who controls it and under which legal framework.”

Local internet exchange points (IXPs), peering ecosystems and regional data centres also play a critical role. Keeping traffic local reduces latency, lowers costs and limits exposure to international outages. However, building and operating this infrastructure requires investment, expertise and coordination - resources that are not evenly distributed.

A shared responsibility

Neither Chiam nor O’Sullivan sees a future where hyperscalers disappear from emerging markets. On the contrary, cloud adoption will continue to accelerate. But the model is evolving.

“We’re moving towards hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” Chiam says. “Sovereign cloud, edge computing and closer partnerships between telcos and cloud providers will all play a role.”

For O’Sullivan, the key lies in honest design decisions. “If you can’t explain to a customer why an outage happened - and why your network was designed that way - then you probably need to rethink that design.”

As cloud outages become more visible and their consequences more tangible, the conversation is shifting. The question is no longer whether failures will occur, but how prepared different markets are when they do. For emerging economies, resilience is no longer a luxury - it is becoming a prerequisite for digital growth.