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© 1999-2025 Techmedics All Rights Reserved.
On the morning of October 20, 2025, thousands of internet websites and services became unavailable. Individuals were unable to access social media sites like Reddit and Snapchat, as well as online gaming platforms including Roblox and Fortnite. The outage also affected many smart devices, including doorbells and even beds.
Shortly after users reported problems, technology company Amazon confirmed that the problem stemmed from an issue within its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
But how exactly did it happen, and what does this mean for your business? In this blog post, we will examine the cause behind the outage and lessons you can learn from it. We’ll also tackle how Techmedics can help you prepare for similar incidents in the future.
According to Amazon, the root cause started in its largest and busiest data center region, US-East-1. An internal system that monitors the health of traffic controllers malfunctioned, causing problems with their domain name system (DNS). DNS is responsible for translating human-readable domain names like www.techmedics.com or www.google.com into machine-readable IP addresses.
Because of this problem, application requests to DynamoDB, Amazon’s key database service, could not be resolved properly, making it temporarily unreachable. As a result, many websites and services relying on AWS and US-East-1 stopped working, including those that were located outside of the United States. This involved social media platforms, financial services, workplace tools, and learning management systems.
While Amazon said core issues were resolved within a few hours of the first reported errors, many apps and websites suffered lingering problems and took time to fully recover from the outage.
With the AWS outage causing massive service disruptions around the world, organizations, particularly those whose operations were affected, can draw several important lessons from it, such as:
Millions of businesses around the world rely on AWS to power their website, app, or service. In fact, it is the leading cloud infrastructure provider today, holding 30% of the market globally.
But popularity doesn’t mean invincibility from outages. AWS and other cloud providers will always be vulnerable to such issues, and the best they can do is minimize their frequency, duration, and impact. This means migrating to the cloud doesn’t make your operations bulletproof and you still need to account for possible downtime.
As mentioned, the AWS outage was caused by a failure in the US-East-1 region. Because this is the default region when setting up AWS, many businesses concentrated their workloads there.
But if the incident taught us something, it’s that hosting your cloud infrastructure in only one region is never a good idea. Those who relied entirely on US-East-1 experienced total disruption and had to wait for Amazon to correct the problem before their services went back online.
That’s why it’s important for your business to have multi-region redundancy. This approach deploys workloads across multiple regions within the same cloud provider. For instance, if your website or app runs in both AWS’s US-East-1 and US-West-2 regions and the former goes down, you can recover faster or avoid downtime altogether.
Many businesses rely on a single cloud provider like AWS to benefit from simplified management, savings through discounts, and streamlined integration. However, many didn’t fully realize how dependent they were on a single piece of technology until their services went down, much like the CrowdStrike incident of 2024.
So instead of relying on one cloud provider, why not invest in a multi-cloud environment? This enables your business to optimize workloads based on a vendor’s performance, location, capacity, and costs. If you’re a multinational company, for instance, AWS can handle your backend services for North America, where latency is low. On the other hand, Azure can support customer-facing apps in Asia and Google Cloud can power analytics tasks in Europe.
Having a multi-cloud strategy also helps you avoid lock-ins with a single vendor, giving you complete control over your cloud infrastructure.
If you need to retain control over certain data or workloads, you can also adopt a hybrid cloud setup. In this model, you can store sensitive data on-premises while hosting your apps in the cloud to meet compliance or latency needs.
The AWS outage resulted in hours of disruption for many businesses around the world. Unfortunately, downtime also translates into lost revenue, diminished productivity, and reputational damage. In extreme cases, downtime may even force an organization to shut down permanently.
As such, it’s essential for your business to build and maintain a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. It must include the following components:
When your cloud environment goes down due to an outage like the one that happened to AWS, it’s essential that your business has backup copies of your data.
One of the best backup practices is the 3-2-1 rule. This involves having three copies of your data, storing them on two different media types, and keeping one copy at another physical location. This means that even if your cloud environment goes down, you can still find a copy elsewhere.
Finally, perform backups frequently and encrypt them to protect against unauthorized access.
Disasters like the AWS outage can happen out of the blue. That’s why your business must be prepared to recover quickly and keep your data protected. The good news is that Techmedics has the tools and strategies for situations just like this. We offer comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solutions, including:
Partner with Techmedics today to keep your business resilient against disasters. Talk to us today for a FREE consultation.
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