One Google zone took down UK banks: your Azure zone audit
A power event in one Google Cloud zone, europe-west2-b in London, left Revolut, HSBC, Lloyds and the UK courts' video platform degraded for most of 20 October 2026, and regulators were asking questions within hours. Azure has the same three-zone model in Sweden Central and the same failure mode when resources are left nonzonal, so here is the service-by-service audit, the Sweden Central price of fixing it, and what DORA Articles 11 and 12 already demand.
AWS lost Bahrain for good: your Azure region-loss plan
AWS confirmed on 15 September 2026 that data hosted only in its Bahrain region, and in one UAE Availability Zone, is permanently lost after Iranian strikes damaged multiple zones, proving that multi-AZ design protects availability but not against losing a whole region. For Azure teams in Sweden and the EU, the fix is a classified inventory, GZRS and geo-redundant backups for critical data, and early access to restricted pair regions such as Sweden South.
ChatGPT, Claude and Grok down at once: your failover plan
On 3 September 2026, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all suffered outages on the same afternoon, each from an independent cause: a routing error at OpenAI, an infrastructure issue at Anthropic and a compute-centre failure behind Grok. A runtime failover plan for Azure teams: Foundry's model router with automatic fallback, APIM's AI gateway and circuit breaker, what redundancy really costs, and the Data Zone and DORA constraints that shape it.
OpenAI cuts off Cursor: your model exit plan on Azure
OpenAI will stop supplying models to Cursor on 12 November 2026, invoking a change-of-control clause after SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition, and Cursor absorbed it because OpenAI carried only 5 percent of its traffic. For Azure buyers the lesson is a model exit plan: what Foundry's lifecycle policy and Microsoft's OpenAI licence actually guarantee, where Claude's EU Data Zone gap bites, the cost of a warm second source, and what DORA already requires.
DORA One Year In: Swedish Fintech Engineering Lessons
One year after the Digital Operational Resilience Act entered into force for financial-sector firms on 17 January 2025, this is what Swedish fintech engineering teams actually learned about ICT risk, incident reporting, TLPT, and the third-party register.