Network fabric events may be utilized to proactively handle network path outages. A storage network virtualization manager may receive a network fabric event indicating a failure along a network path to a storage device and in response may initiate a proactive error handling mechanism. A storage network virtualization manager may proactively handle a network path failure before I/O requests via that network path fail. The proactive error handling mechanism may be initiated and completed prior to or without a host receiving an indication that an access request to a storage device on the network path has failed. Proactive error handling in response to network fabric events may reduce the number of I/O failures and retries and may also reduce the length of time access requests to storage devices affected by a network fabric path failure must be quiesced.