What the AWS Outage Reveals About Cloud Dependency

On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services experienced a major outage that disrupted apps and websites around the world. Reports listed impacts across social, finance, gaming, media, and even parts of Amazon’s retail operations. See coverage from Reuters, Associated Press, and the Guardian.

AWS later said services recovered and shared an explanation that pointed to DNS resolution issues affecting DynamoDB endpoints in the US-EAST-1 region, with knock-on effects to other services. See the official AWS update here: About Amazon: AWS service disruptions update. Independent analysis from ThousandEyes also traced the incident timeline and blast radius: ThousandEyes: AWS Outage Analysis, October 20, 2025.

This was not just a technical story. It was a business story about control, cost, and resilience.

Why this matters for business leaders

It is easy to get lost in service names and status pages. The core business impact is simpler.

• Control shifts away from you. You keep paying for reliability, but when the provider has a fault you cannot do much beyond wait. That was clear across industries during this event.
• Revenue and reputation take the hit. Login, payments, ordering, and support channels all rely on foundational services. When those foundations shake, customers feel it immediately.
• Concentration raises risk. Experts called out how much of the internet depends on a few providers, which turns a provider-side outage into an economy-wide event.

The hidden cost of over-reliance

Cloud convenience is real. So are the tradeoffs that do not show up in a demo.

• Lock-in creeps in quietly. Each managed service adds speed at first and a constraint later. In a failure you may have no local workaround.
• Costs multiply in the background. Data transfer, event-based billing, and layered add-ons make budgeting hard. During incidents you can still incur charges while value to customers drops.
• A single provider becomes a single point of failure at scale. When a hyperscaler stumbles, many businesses stumble at once.

None of this means abandon the cloud. It means own your risk and your fallback plan.

When AWS is still a good choice

Using AWS can be the right call. The point is to be deliberate about where and how you depend on it.

• Burst and uncertainty. If your traffic is unpredictable or spiky, elastic capacity is hard to beat.
• Global reach and content delivery. Edge networks and managed distribution help small teams deliver worldwide performance quickly.
• Specialized services. Transcoding, managed GPUs, ML platforms, and other heavy infrastructure can be faster to adopt on AWS than to build.
• Trusted platforms built on AWS. Many developer platforms run on top of hyperscalers. For example, this site is deployed on a provider, Vercel, that is using AWS under the hood for parts of its infrastructure. That can be fine as long as you understand the dependency and have a plan for outages.

The question is not “cloud or not.” It is “which parts must we control, and what is our plan when a provider fails for several hours.”

Independence does not mean isolation

Independent infrastructure is not about rejecting cloud services. It is about clear ownership and simple, portable building blocks.

• Core data you can move and restore. Postgres or MySQL with verified backups and a documented restore process.
• Straightforward web entry. NGINX or HAProxy in front of your app for routing, TLS, and rate limits.
• Simple background work. A small queue and scheduled jobs you can run and test locally.
• Predictable storage. S3-compatible object storage with a clear export path.
• Observability you can read. A short list of alerts that match business impact, not a firehose of noise.

This is not nostalgia. It is choosing clarity over guesswork so incidents are fixable.

A 30-day audit any company can run

You do not need a replatform to improve your position. Start with visibility and drills.

1. Map your dependencies. List every third-party service that sits on the critical path for customer value. Note which ones you cannot operate without vendor action.
2. Rehearse failure. Choose one service and simulate a four-hour loss. What breaks for customers and what continues to work. How would your team respond.
3. Document recovery. Write a short restore runbook for your database and files. Perform a test restore into a clean environment.
4. Reduce unknown costs. Break your bill into compute, storage, transfer, and services. Remove anything you do not need in the next 90 days.
5. Pick one fallback. Identify one component you can own directly, such as static assets or a secondary status page on a different provider, and implement it.

Small, focused steps are better than a big plan that never ships.

Closing thought

Outages fade from headlines, but the lesson remains. Technology control equals business control. The cloud is a powerful tool. It should not be your only one. Own the parts that matter, keep options open, and make recovery a habit.

• AWS official update: AWS service disruptions update

As we outlined in Why the Cloud Is Failing Us, the problem isn’t the technology itself but how dependence has replaced design. The AWS outage is a clear example of that dependency playing out in real time.