On September 30 and October 1, 2026, Azure gateway services degraded or dropped hybrid connectivity across 18 regions for nearly six hours, two days after an Azure OpenAI incident in Sweden Central. Microsoft has tied the disruption to a gateway-management change, and the episode is a live-fire lesson in how hyperscaler control planes fail — and what to test before the next one.

On August 31, 2026, AWS Interconnect multicloud opened to Azure in public preview: a VPC and a VNet linked over AWS’s private backbone, no third-party carrier, but capped at 1 Gbps with no availability commitment. Test it for shared AWS-Azure workloads, but keep your existing circuits until general availability.