Introduction
On October 20 2025, AWS experienced a major global outage that disrupted dozens of popular websites, apps and services. While the downtime lasted only hours, the ripple effects have highlighted how deeply many businesses and users rely on a small set of cloud infrastructure providers.
In this article we’ll break down: what happened, why it matters, what implications it has for businesses (especially in India/Asia), and what you can do to protect yourself and your customers going forward.
What happened during the outage
- The outage began in the US-East-1 region — one of AWS’s main data-centre clusters.
- The root cause appears to be a DNS (Domain Name System) failure that impacted AWS’s DynamoDB endpoint in that region.
- Many services experienced elevated error rates, latency spikes and failures across AWS services such as EC2, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB etc.
- Popular platforms affected included: Snapchat, Roblox, Venmo, Reddit, Duolingo, smart-device apps (Alexa), and many more globally.
- Although AWS reported that “services returned to normal operations” by evening in US time, it noted some services still had backlog processing and residual issues.
Why this outage is a big deal
1. Internet backbone fragility
Even though the outage lasted hours, the fact that a single region’s failure could cascade into so many services shows how fragile the cloud underpinning many modern businesses has become.
2. Concentration risk
A few cloud-providers dominate global infrastructure (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud). When one suffers, the effect is wide.
3. Business impact
Downtime costs: lost revenue, lost productivity, reputation damage. The outage reinforced that businesses must plan for “what if the cloud provider fails”. The Economic Times
4. Signal for future caution
This isn’t the first major AWS outage, and experts suggest such large-scale failures may become more frequent as complexity grows.
What this means for businesses in India / Asia
- Indian companies that rely on AWS or use services hosted on AWS should review their contingency planning.
- For companies offering services to Indian users: even if your primary cloud region is elsewhere, disruptions in other regions or in downstream dependencies may still affect you.
- Cloud cost-optimization often drives us to consolidate regions; now is a moment to evaluate whether cost savings compromise resilience.
- For startups and SMBs: reliance on the “default cloud stack” may need rethinking — multi-region, multi-cloud or hybrid models may be more important than ever.
Key take-aways and lessons learnt
- Don’t assume “always available” means forever available. Even major cloud providers can suffer large outages.
- Architect for failure. Use redundancy across regions, availability zones, or even multiple cloud providers.
- Monitor dependencies. It’s not just your infrastructure — it’s the infrastructure of the infrastructure you depend on.
- Prepare your communication strategy. In outages, users/customers may panic; timely, transparent communication is key.
- Evaluate your failover / disaster recovery plan. Are you prepared for the cloud provider you depend on going down?
- Learn from past events. Review post-mortems, build better mental models of what can go wrong.
What you can practically do RIGHT NOW
- Review your cloud architecture: are you relying solely on one region or one provider?
- Test your failover: simulate region-failure, cloud-provider failure, network failure.
- Check your backup and caching strategies: ensure that critical functionality can continue even when upstream services fail.
- Establish clear customer-communication protocols: in case of downtime, stakeholders must be informed.
- Update your SLAs and contracts: if you are a service-provider, ensure you have provisions for cloud-provider risk.
- Document your key dependencies: make a map of what services you depend on (directly and indirectly).
Explore our detailed guide on how to build and manage a multi-cloud environment here:
Navigating the Cloud Landscape: A Comprehensive Guide to Multicloud
Looking ahead: What to watch
- When will AWS publish a detailed root-cause analysis and post-mortem? Many users expect clarity.
- How will cloud providers respond: will we see further investment in fault-isolation, region independence, resilience?
- Will businesses accelerate migration to hybrid/multi-cloud models?
- For Indian/Asia region: will more local data-centres, or on-premises fallback, become more mainstream?
- Regulatory implications: for sectors like finance, healthcare — where downtime is critical — could this event trigger more regulation of cloud resilience?
Conclusion
The recent AWS outage may be over in terms of restored services, but the message remains loud and clear: cloud dependency is real, and risk is real too. For any business relying on digital services — which nowadays includes almost everyone — it’s time to revisit assumptions, build greater resilience, and plan for the inevitable “what if”.
If you act now, you’ll be better positioned for the next major disruption (and yes, there will be one).
