What Happened with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20, 2025
Earlier today, AWS experienced a significant outage that affected a wide range of businesses, services and applications globally, particularly resulting in an amazon aws outage. (The Verge) Here’s a breakdown of what we know, how the incident unfolded, and what it means for businesses — especially small businesses like yours.
Incident Timeline & Scope
- The problems began in the US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region — one of AWS’s largest and most widely used data-centre hubs. (The Register)
- AWS reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple services” and pointed to issues with DNS resolution of its Amazon DynamoDB API endpoint as a likely root cause. (The Register)
- A broad set of consumer- and enterprise-facing apps and websites went down or experienced degraded service. Some of the affected names include Snapchat, Fortnite, Signal, Duolingo, Venmo, Reddit, among many others. (Tom’s Guide)
- AWS issued updates indicating the “underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated” and that service operations were “succeeding normally” for many customers. (Financial Times)
- However, even after the main fix, some customers continued to experience elevated error rates or intermittent issues. (Financial Times)
Why This Outage Mattered
For small businesses — and any business relying on cloud infrastructure — this outage is a reminder of several critical considerations:
- Cloud provider dependency
When AWS has problems, the ripple effect is enormous. Because so many services build on top of AWS infrastructure — whether directly or indirectly — a disruption in one region or one internal component can cascade widely. (The Guardian) - Single-point region risk
Even though cloud providers distribute workloads across regions, some regions (like US-East-1 for AWS) host key functionalities and a majority of traffic. When something goes wrong there, the impact is disproportionately large. (The Register) - Business continuity & downstream effects
The outage impacted apps, payment flows, retail checkout systems, login/authentication flows, and more. For small businesses this can mean disrupted operations, unhappy customers, revenue loss, or reputational damage. (Tom’s Guide) - Transparency & recovery
AWS communicated the incident publicly via its Health Dashboard and gave updates on mitigation. It also has a policy to publish a full “Post-Event Summary” (PES) after major incidents, outlining root causes and corrective actions. (Amazon Web Services, Inc.)
What You, as a Small Business Owner, Should Consider
Given what we know about this outage, here are key take-aways and actionable steps you can take for your own technology stack:
- Check your dependencies: Do you rely on services hosted on AWS (directly or via third-party apps)? If those upstream services go down, your business may also be affected indirectly.
- Review your region/zone strategy: If you or your vendor run resources only in one region (especially a heavily used region like US-East-1), ask whether your workloads are distributed or have fallback options.
- Ensure backups and failover plans: For critical infrastructure (such as login systems, customer-facing apps, data stores), ensure you have backups, alternative paths, or contingency workflows.
- Monitor service status: Use status dashboards (e.g., the AWS Health Dashboard) or third-party alerting tools to detect upstream problems early. (AWS Documentation)
- Educate your team: If you have in-house staff or vendors, make sure they know what to do in case of cloud outage: e.g., switch to an alternative region, activate contingency mode, customer communication templates.
- Talk to your tech partner/vendor: If you use an IT or cloud partner (like us at Southwest Cloud Partners!), ask them how they manage risk across infrastructure, what their failover strategies are, and how quickly they can respond when cloud providers falter.
Final Thoughts
Today’s AWS outage serves as a stark reminder that even the largest, most-trusted cloud providers are not immune to failures. Relying entirely on one provider or one region without contingency plans can be risky. For small businesses, where downtime can translate directly into lost income or clients, this kind of event underscores why having a reliable tech partner — someone who understands cloud risk, monitors your dependencies, and proactively plans for failures — is not optional.
If you’d like help assessing your technology stack, reviewing your cloud provider risk, or crafting a business-continuity plan — we’d be happy to help. Just let us know.
