Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Today’s higher education institutions operate complex digital ecosystems that were unimaginable a decade ago. Behind every college lies a portal of interconnected systems for registration, financial aid, course management, and campus services. The students using those systems are digital natives who can order food in seconds on their phones or have packages delivered the same day they order them.

When something breaks in a modern digital service, customers feel it instantly. Pages stall, requests time out, and carts are abandoned, while frustration grows long before a root cause is identified. What the world never sees is the engineering effort required to keep these systems healthy in the first place. Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) carry that responsibility every day.

On December 11, 2025, GitHub experienced intermittent disruptions that frustrated users across the globe. Developers everywhere started seeing random errors, 503s, unicorns, and CI pipeline failures. Very quickly it became clear something was wrong, even though GitHub’s status page still said ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL. After the incident was over, GitHub published a postmortem that revealed the cause: scrapers. Automated tools hit GitHub with enough traffic to overwhelm key backend systems.

In Part 1, we talked about all the hidden complexity inside AI systems: the pipelines, GPUs, embeddings, vector databases, orchestration layers, and everything else that quietly determines how reliable an AI-first product really is. But all of that software still rests on something far less glamorous: the physical infrastructure underneath it.

Cloud outages in 2025 ranged from minor ones affecting some sections of users, to major ones affecting hundreds or thousands of users. Services like Cloudflare and AWS on which many other services depend experienced outages that affected many due to the cascading effect. Let's look at some of the major cloud outages in 2025.

On the morning of December 10, 2025, Microsoft Teams experienced a service disruption affecting users across Australia. Although Microsoft 365 users reported issues across several apps, the hardest hit service was Microsoft Teams which became completely unusable for many organizations. While Microsoft did not acknowledge the incident until 03:46 UTC StatusGator identified the issue at 02:52 UTC through incoming outage reports and delivered an Early Warning Signal at 03:01 UTC.

Welcome to Spike! Whether you’ve just set up your account or joined an existing team, this guide will help you understand how to receive and respond to incidents.

“We’ve got a new alert – have you seen it yet?”“Which one? The CPU spike or the unusual login?”“The login. Same region as yesterday. But the CPU thing looks suspicious too.”“…Alright, I’ll check the firewall logs. You take the containers.”“Perfect. Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into another all-hands situation.” Does this conversation sound familiar?