For many organizations, the move to the cloud has delivered on much of what it promised: dynamic scalability, zero downtime deployments, and the freedom to offload infrastructure. In many ways, it’s delivered the kind of reliability and efficiency IT teams once only dreamed of.

But what do you do when the cloud doesn’t live up to its silver lining?

This morning, on October 20, 2025, an AWS outage centered in its US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region took out some of the biggest names on the web. Apps went dark, websites slowed or failed, and the ripple effects were felt across industries. While AWS engineers are actively working toward full recovery, this outage serves as a stark reminder that even the largest cloud provider can falter and “resolved” issues can resurface unexpectedly.

In keeping with our earlier guidance on “What Happens When Your Cloud Provider Goes Down,” this event gives us real-world context for what to expect, how to respond, and how to prepare. 

What We Know So Far

Here's a summary of the outage and how it played out:

• Many downstream platforms, such as social-apps, gaming services, fintechs and more, reported disruptions: for example, Snapchat, Fortnite, Ring, and others.
• Tracking sites show the incident began around 3:11 a.m. ET when multiple services flagged issues, including API delays, networking anomalies, and DNS problems.
• According to AWS’s public status updates: “We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
• While AWS says the underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, they also note that “some customers still continue to experience increased error rates with AWS Services."

What AWS Customers Should Do in Light of Today’s Incident

If your business or website uses AWS, here are the key steps you should take right now (and a few things to prepare for in the future) based on what happened today:

• Verify where your systems are hosted. This outage may have affected US-East-1, but any region could have an issue like this in the future. One of the biggest benefits of the cloud is "multi-regional" deployments where machines in a different region can make up for failing infrastructure.
  • If possible, talk to your tech team or provider about adding a backup location in another region.
• Turn on AWS outage alerts. Make sure someone on your team is signed up for AWS’s service health notifications so you know about problems as soon as they happen.
• Plan for partial functionality. During outages, your site might not work perfectly, but you can design it to still do something.
  • For example, make sure your app can still show basic content or let users log in, even if some features are temporarily unavailable.
  • Where possible, keep a local copy of your data (a “cache”) available for your application to use in case the source goes down.
• Practice “what if” scenarios. Test what would happen if AWS goes down again.
  • Can customers still access your website?
  • Do you have backups that can be turned on quickly?
  • Does your team know who to contact and what to say to customers?
• Keep your communication plan ready. Have a short, pre-written message you can send to customers during outages and make sure everyone on your team knows their role during an outage.
• Know what your business depends on. List out the tools and systems your organization uses that run on AWS, such as your database, payment tools, or login system. This helps you see which parts might break if AWS has issues again.
• Be ready to handle delays and errors. When AWS slows down, requests can pile up. Make sure your app or site can “wait its turn” rather than crash completely by temporarily saving user requests or showing a helpful message.
• Review your partners and vendors. Many other services you use (like payment systems, CRMs, email tools, or analytics) may also rely on AWS. Reach out to them to see how they’re protecting their systems during cloud outages too.
• Review and improve after things calm down. Once AWS is back to normal, gather your team to talk through what worked, what didn’t, and what to improve next time to strengthen your plan and systems.

Key Takeaways

Our earlier blog pointed out several risks when the cloud provider goes down, here’s how today’s incident mirrors them:

• Single-region dependence is risky. If your workload runs primarily in US-East-1, you are exposed to region-wide failures.
• Deep chain of dependencies. Here, internal services like DNS, network-monitoring, load-balancers (all within AWS’s own “back-end”) were implicated, showing that even non-customer services can cascade into major outages.
• Recovery doesn’t mean “instant normal.” Even after AWS declares mitigation, lag, backlog and throttling persist, your users will still feel it.
• Communications and transparency matter. Customers and end-users are impacted; timely internal and external messaging builds trust.

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