The internet isn’t an abstract thing. It’s a handful of data centres, control planes, and human decisions. On October 20, a fault inside AWS’s system broke that illusion, culminating in a cloud outage that shocked the world.
A DNS resolution failure affecting DynamoDB API endpoints prevented dependent services from locating their databases and APIs, triggering cascading outages across consumer apps, enterprise SaaS platforms, and even public services. The incident laid bare the industry’s over-reliance on single providers and the fragility of supposedly “redundant” architectures.
For IT, security and C-suite leaders, this embodied a board-level wake-up call about concentrated systemic risk and the cost of complacency.
Anatomy of the Outage: How a Single DNS Failure Crippled AWS’s Backbone
On October 20, 2025, AWS reported elevated error rates and service failures originating from its US-EAST-1 region, one of its largest and most critical. According to AWS’s own timeline, the issue stemmed from DNS resolution failures that prevented regional DynamoDB API endpoints from being located. In simple terms, services couldn’t find their own databases.
That small but fundamental break cascaded across the stack. Load balancers, Lambda functions, SQS queues, and SDKs all failed in sequence as they waited for responses that never came. The outage rippled outward, freezing automation workflows and delaying critical background processes across thousands of businesses.
AWS began mitigation within hours and restored stability after deploying DNS and routing fixes, but the damage was done. Queued requests, interdependent workloads, and delayed recoveries meant user-facing issues persisted for much of the day. monday.com, Zoom, and several other SaaS platforms confirmed disruptions on their status pages. For many, the outage was an unwelcome reminder that even the cloud has a single point of failure.
Technical Takeaways: Designing for Failure, Not Perfection
The outage underlined a painful truth: redundancy is not resilience. Many systems had backups that depended on the very infrastructure that failed; a mirage of safety hiding systemic weakness.
What, technically, can security and IT leaders learn from the incident?
“The AWS outage shows the danger of building critical services around a single point of failure,” suggested James Watts, Managing Director at Databarracks, to UC Today. ” True resilience means designing for disruption: distributing workloads, building in failover and testing for regional loss. For critical services, multi-region or multi-cloud resilience isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity.”
Watts believes incidents like this underscore the need to assume your primary region will fail and plan recovery accordingly.
Watts believes incidents like this underscore the need to assume your primary region will fail and plan recovery accordingly. “One of the supposed benefits of cloud computing is that it reduces risk,” he said. “But in a region-wide outage, supply chains are hit through the various technologies and SaaS services dependent on it.”
“If your organisation was surprised to be affected by this incident, the action to take is to review your supply chain and look at your supplier’s suppliers.”
At a more granular level, architectural reform is overdue. Chris Ciabarra, Co-founder and CTO at Athena Security Weapons Detection System, told UC Today that organisations must decouple their load-balancing and data replication strategies from any single provider.
“Start by decoupling your traffic flow from proprietary load balancers,” he advised. “Most large providers restrict load balancing within their own environments, which limits redundancy and keeps your eggs in one basket. Instead, adopt an independent load distribution layer that can route across regions and providers. Use cross-region replication for critical data and keep warm backups running in alternate environments.”
The goal, Ciabarra added, is containment: to architect systems so that a failure in one region doesn’t cascade across dependent services; a principle still too rare in enterprise design.
Security and Resilience: The Visibility Gap That Cost Millions
When DynamoDB and DNS went dark, so did many organisations’ monitoring systems and failover scripts. The outage exposed a deeper weakness: a lack of visibility into dependencies that made recovery guesswork.
“Most teams couldn’t immediately tell which applications were tied to AWS DynamoDB endpoints until the systems went dark,” said Ciabarra. “That’s not a cyber problem, it’s an observability problem.”
He suggested investing in AI-driven monitoring that tracks not just uptime but service interdependencies in real time. According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, companies with full AI observability reduced the impact of major incidents by 43 percent.
“Visibility isn’t optional,” Ciabarra stressed. “It’s the foundation of resilience.”
Rob Forbes, CISO at Stratascale, told UC Today that businesses should “conduct realistic failover drills, plan for endpoint outages, assess single-provider risks, build DNS resilience, and review SLAs to understand what’s actually covered.”
Essentially, resilience starts before the outage, in dependency mapping, proactive testing, and the willingness to explore how the business fails, not just how it runs.
Culture, Vendors and the Human Factor in Cloud Recovery
Technology failed first, but communication failed faster. Many organisations lacked clear playbooks, vendor escalation paths, and decision authority when the outage struck. Recovery lagged as teams scrambled for clarity.
“Technology enables recovery, but it’s people and preparation that make it work,” said Watts. “The organisations that recover best don’t just have plans, they practise them. Testing under realistic conditions builds confidence, strengthens coordination, and helps teams make better decisions when disruption strikes.”
That practice, often called chaos engineering, simulates large-scale failures in controlled conditions. It’s a discipline that should stretch beyond IT to involve operations, HR, finance, and communications.
Watts added:
“True resilience comes from a culture where recovery is everyone’s responsibility, not just IT’s. When that mindset takes hold, the response to disruption becomes calm, coordinated and effective.”
Ciabarra echoed that view, arguing that enterprises must pivot away from efficiency-at-all-costs thinking. “For two decades, we optimised for cost and speed,” he said. “This outage showed that over-optimisation is fragility in disguise. Recovery depends on empowering cross-functional teams to act quickly, maintaining up-to-date playbooks, and rewarding engineers for finding single points of failure , not just cutting spend.”
According to PwC, companies with mature resilience cultures recover three times faster from major outages. As Ciabarra put it, “Security isn’t only a system design issue; it’s a leadership mindset.”
Speaking of leadership…
What to Tell the Board: Turning Outages into Action
For many executives, the AWS incident should redefine cloud risk as strategic risk, not just a technical variable buried in an IT report.
“The discussions must focus on strategic risk adversity, contractual obligations with service providers, and operational resilience,” said Cynthia Overby, Director of Strategic Security Solutions at Rocket Software, to UC Today. “Companies should plan for graceful slowdowns, not just total outages.”
Overby, who has over 40 years’ experience in cybersecurity and strategy, believes boardrooms must build long-term plans that include multi-region failover, multi-cloud diversification, or bringing critical workloads in-house. “They should investigate diversifying critical dependencies across major cloud players,” she added.
“Organisations then must decide whether it makes sense to dedicate resources to building a more resilient internal infrastructure and implement chaos engineering to test for weaknesses.”
Watts agreed, urging boards to interrogate their dependency maps and continuity posture: “Leaders need a clear view of where their operations rely on a single provider, availability zone or region, and what the plan is when that dependency fails. Boards should be asking not just how resilient their technology is, but how confident they are in their ability to communicate, recover and continue serving customers when disruption strikes.”
Building a Cloud Strategy That Survives the Next AWS Moment
The October 2025 AWS outage will fade from headlines, but its lessons must not. It exposed the limits of scale, the illusion of redundancy, and the human cost of underestimating risk. For many organisations, it was a stark reminder that resilience is not a line item in a budget or a slide in a strategy deck. It is the architecture, culture, and governance that determine whether business continues when the world goes dark.
For IT and security leaders, the path forward begins with visibility and diversification. Knowing where your critical dependencies lie, down to the last endpoint and SaaS vendor, is no longer optional. Building true multi-region or multi-cloud architectures, supported by independent load distribution and rigorous testing, transforms resilience from aspiration to design principle. These are not theoretical measures; they are operational necessities in an era where a single DNS failure can paralyse global commerce.
Yet technology alone will not protect the enterprise. The organisations that endure the next systemic outage will be those that treat resilience as a shared discipline across every function. HR, finance, operations, and communications all have roles to play in sustaining continuity. Practised playbooks, transparent vendor relationships, and a culture that rewards foresight rather than speed are the markers of mature resilience.
The AWS outage wasn’t a failure of the cloud. It was a failure to remember that even the cloud has a breaking point.
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This post originally appeared on Service Management - Enterprise - Channel News - UC Today.