While cloud services offer us lots of flexility when it comes to to choosing infrastructure and services, and how we pay for them, they are not infallible. There's an outage in progress with two-factor authentication services that's affecting Azure and Office 365 at the moment which highlights the importance of having a reliable Plan B.

Click Frenzy started today at 7pm AEDT, but most Aussies couldn't get onto the site even at 6:30pm, half an hour before the sale was meant to open. Now, while everything should be in full swing, frustrated users are reporting widespread 503 errors and problems with logins. Here's what you need to know.

There are two types of systems; those that have failed and those that will fail. And it seems that the country's largest telco, Telstra, has been "blessed" with both sorts. Over the weekend, Telstra suffered yet another embarrassing outage. The company's machine-to-machine network, that supports EFTPOS services, ATMs and prisoner monitoring devices went down.

It's happening again! Telstra customers have been hit by another widespread outage with 3G and 4G users affected nationwide. Here's what we know.

Most businesses have disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Often, they are baked into the design of systems so, if something goes wrong, another system picks up the load and things keep running, more or less, as designed. If you think about a modern passenger jet, there are lots of redundant systems so it's highly unlikely the failure of a single part causes a disaster. Telstra's recent season of outages continued yesterday with a problem that knocked out much of their phone and data network. But should the outage have been avoidable?

Yesterday, thousands of Telstra customers were stranded without access to mobile voice or data for nearly five hours. It was the third outage affecting Telstra services this month. Now, the beleaguered telco has released a statement explaining what went wrong.

Telstra's mobile network is experiencing yet another outage, with thousands of 4G and 3G customers affected around the country. The good news is that Telstra has finally restored services for most customers. But you might need to restart your phone to get reconnected.

A rotten run continues: Commonwealth Bank is currently experiencing issues processing transactions with some Visa Cards.

On March 7, we reported that an NBN Node had been taken out by a car in Kellyville, NSW. In perhaps the perfect summation of everything that has gone wrong with the NBN, that same NBN node has once again been taken out by a car, disrupting services in Kellyville for the second time in two weeks. Less than 24 hours later, it was reportedly then hit for a third time.

Did your friends get really quiet all of a sudden? It's not just you -- Facebook Messenger seems to be experiencing a global outage at the moment.

Areas within the suburb I live in are experiencing a significant Telstra outage. According to residents, they have been notified that the outage will last around two days. And while many of the people most vociferously complaining are parents whose kids are missing the latest instalment of Paw Patrol on Foxtel, there's a more severe, at least in my view, impact. All those households will be without Internet access for a couple of days. In 2017 - is that good enough?

Back in the day, an email outage at Hotmail/MSN/Outlook.com would have been a big deal. But I'm not sure it's such a big deal these days. However, Outlook is in the throes of an outage that was first reported this morning on Aussie Outages. I'm not sure too many Lifehacker readers will still be running their Hotmail accounts - maybe you've kept one for the odd MySpace request you get - but the outage seems to be localised to Australian and Japanese customers.

Roughly 48 hours after its major service outage, Amazon is admitting what caused the problem. Apparently, some poor engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) did an oopsie and brought the internet to its knees. Oopsies are the worst!

The fact that Amazon controls a vast swath of cloud computing services became dreadfully clear on Wednesday morning when a string of errors brought countless websites to their knees. This consolidation of power is, perhaps suddenly, a very big problem.

If your business has a fixed-line Internet connection through Telstra, you might be having some problems talking to the outside world right now. Australia's largest telco is experiencing a bit of a hiccup with its Chatswood exchange again, which is apparently impacting hardline business connections around the state of NSW.

The Optus network is currently experiencing difficulties with many customers unable to access SMS. Optus is aware of the issue and is investigating the cause. Here's what we know so far.

It felt like déjà vu on Sunday night when Vodafone suffered a network outage that affected its mobile services nationwide. Customers experienced problems with data, texts and calls for seven hours, harkening back to the telco's 'Vodafail' days. Vodafone is now doing damage control by giving every mobile customer 2GB of bonus data. Here are the details.

Vodafone is experiencing problems with data, text and calls across Australia, with users reporting that their phones and devices are unable to connect to the network at all. Vodafone is working to fix the problem as a top priority, but at this point have no ETA for when it will be resolved.

Google's popular email service Gmail is currently experiencing a widespread outage. The problem seems to be isolated to Google for Work Gmail users. The service has been restored for some users but there is still no estimated time as to when the problem will be fixed. Read on to find out more.