Google and Amazon Web Services have joined forces to give customers a faster way to switch resources during major outages. The partnership comes after both companies faced incidents where widespread cloud service failures left customers billions of dollars out of pocket.

In October 2025, AWS suffered a major disruption that knocked thousands of websites and services offline, including Snapchat, Alexa, Reddit, and Fortnite. The outage was estimated to cost customers between US$500–650 million. Just months earlier, in June 2025, Google experienced its own failure after internal code quality protections were ignored. The incident impacted virtual machines, cloud storage, managed databases, and more, with services such as OpenAI, Shopify, Spotify, Cloudflare, and Fitbit among those affected.

Although the two tech giants are usually rivals, enabling customers to switch seamlessly between platforms could save enormous sums in the future. As Google explained in a statement: “Today, we announced a significant collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer a managed, private, and secure on‑demand solution for cross‑cloud connectivity.”

“This solution is designed to enable customers to easily build enterprise-grade applications that span both Google Cloud and AWS environments. This collaboration is particularly timely, as the adoption of multicloud applications is rapidly accelerating, driven in part by the rise of AI,” Google says in its statement.

Google says a Forbes survey had highlighted that 82 percent of respondents anticipated that the arrival of AI services would increase the demand for multicloud networking, due to the scarcity of specialized accelerator resources and the availability of diverse AI agents across different vendors.

“The surge in multicloud adoption is a strategic imperative for organizations looking to build agentic AI applications, optimize workloads, access best-of-breed services, meet data residency requirements, and ensure the necessary resiliency for modern hybrid and multicloud applications.

“We designed the Cross-Cloud Network to simplify and optimize networking between Google Cloud and other providers. This commitment to multicloud integration has led to over 50% of the Fortune 500 currently using the Cross-Cloud Network, and this collaboration provides a significant boost. Importantly, this new jointly engineered solution with AWS is being published under an open specification, creating an opportunity to expand the reach, allowing other providers to contribute and implement this solution in their own environments, further benefiting mutual customers.”

Switching services is made available through a Cross-Cloud Interconnect. Google described it as a powerful expansion of its Cloud Interconnect portfolio. “This innovation allows you to build on-demand connections in minutes between your Google Cloud and AWS VPCs, transforming multicloud networking from a complex build into a simple, managed service.”

In its statement, AWS says customers no longer have to manually set up complex networks including physical connections and routing protocols.

“Now, in the AWS Console or Command Line Interface (CLI), customers can get multicloud connectivity in three simple steps: 1/ specify the target cloud service providers, 2/ select the destination region on the other side, and 3/ pick the required bandwidth. Once provisioning is completed, customers receive a single attachment that represents network capacity to their chosen provider.”