Lessons from the AWS Outage: What Small Businesses Can Learn

The recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20, 2025 was a wake-up call for businesses of all sizes. For a few tense hours, a DNS failure in AWS’s Northern Virginia (US-East-1) region cascaded into a major cloud outage, taking down applications many of us use daily. In fact, this outage “silenced half the internet,” as major platforms like Snapchat, Alexa, and Coinbase went dark and millions of users were thrown into chaos. If the world’s largest companies can be affected, no business is immune to disruption – including small businesses.

What Happened During the AWS Outage?

In the early hours of October 20, 2025 (around 3 a.m. ET), AWS’s busiest data center in Northern Virginia suffered an operational issue with its DNS services. DNS (Domain Name System) is the backbone service that translates human-friendly URLs into the network addresses that computers use. When AWS’s internal DNS hiccuped, many core AWS services (like database and authentication APIs) couldn’t locate each other, triggering errors and latency across multiple service.

Within minutes, the incident escalated into one of the year’s biggest cloud outages. Apps and websites across industries began failing simultaneously. Well-known services – including social networks, voice assistants, cryptocurrency platforms, popular games, and streaming services – were suddenly unavailable. For example, users of Snapchat, Venmo, Roblox, Fortnite, Ring, Disney+, Prime Video, and even some government services all experienced outages. Downdetector, a site that tracks service issues, recorded a spike of tens of thousands of problem reports as the outage spread globally. In effect, a critical part of the internet’s infrastructure sneezed, and the “entire internet caught a cold”.

AWS engineers worked quickly to diagnose the root cause – a DNS resolution failure affecting the DynamoDB database service endpoint – and by about 6 a.m. ET they began rolling out fixes. Services started recovering, but even after AWS resolved the core issue, some applications remained unreachable for hours due to cached DNS entries still pointing to nowhere. By late morning most major platforms were back online, although the incident wasn’t fully cleared until AWS drained backlogged requests and verified all systems.

AWS officially described the root cause as an “operational issue” in US-East-1 and emphasized that it was working to mitigate the problem and prevent recurrence. Importantly, AWS noted that the outage, while severe, was confined to the single region (US-East-1) and did not stem from a broader compromise of their infrastructure. In other words, the cloud itself wasn’t deemed fundamentally unreliable – this was a regional failure of a critical dependency, of a type that cloud providers have seen before and learned to contain.

For small businesses, it’s vital to understand why this happened: a chain reaction from one region’s DNS failure. Many companies (even those hosting systems in other AWS regions) discovered that some of their workloads still depended on the affected region – for example, for authentication or global services. This interdependence meant even backups or multi-zone setups within AWS might not have been enough to avoid disruption. The outage dramatically demonstrated how dependent modern business operations are on cloud services, and how a single point of failure can ripple across the globe.

Lesson 1: No Business Is Immune to Cloud Outages

If the AWS outage proved anything, it’s that no company – regardless of size – is immune to disruption. Amazon’s cloud powers a huge portion of the internet (roughly one-third of internet infrastructure by some estimates), so when AWS has a bad day, everyone can feel it. The world’s largest enterprises and the smallest startups rely on the same cloud foundations. When that foundation shakes, everyone feels it – from retail giants to local e-commerce sites.

For a small business owner, this realization is crucial. You might think “I’m just a small operation, would an AWS issue really affect me?” The answer is yes – directly or indirectly. Even if you don’t run your own servers on AWS, many of the third-party services you use (payment gateways, CRMs, website hosts, etc.) do rely on it. For instance, during the outage, countless downstream services froze: e-commerce checkouts failed, online payments timed out, and internal tools stopped working. Sales pipelines froze, customer support inquiries spiked, and transactions stalled because systems were down. Even a single hour of cloud downtime can erase months of customer trust and revenue if users cannot access your product or service.

The takeaway: Don’t assume that “the cloud” will always be up. Cloud providers like AWS promise high uptime (AWS, for example, offers 99.99% availability for multi-zone deployments of certain services) – but even 0.01% downtime can translate to several minutes or hours of unplanned downtime over a year. And if your systems aren’t architected for resilience, those few hours can have outsized impact. Outages are rare, but they happen to everyone. Recognizing that fact is the first step toward preparing your business to handle them.

Lesson 2: Downtime Is a Business Issue, Not Just an IT Issue

It’s easy to view outages as a purely technical problem – something for the IT team to worry about. The AWS incident highlights that downtime can cripple your entire business operation, not just your computers. When your website or service is offline:

You may lose sales: Online customers can’t make purchases, leading to lost revenue. If you run an e-commerce shop and AWS goes down during a peak period, every minute could mean orders unfulfilled.
Customer trust is damaged: Users often don’t care why you’re down; they only know they can’t access what they need. Many will blame your brand (not AWS) for the inconvenience. Repeated issues erode confidence.
Operational chaos ensues: Your team might not be able to access the tools they need. Communication systems can fail, and employees scramble without guidance. Customer support gets flooded with complaints while lacking information to share.
Hidden costs accumulate: Besides immediate lost sales, consider the cost of recovery, overtime for IT staff, potential breach of service-level agreements with your clients, and reputational damage. One analysis showed enterprise-scale outages can cost $5,000–$9,000 per minute. For a small business, even a fraction of that cost – and the lost productivity – is significant.

In short, cloud strategy is now a form of business insurance. Investing in reliable architecture and continuity plans is like paying premiums to protect your business’s livelihood. The businesses that bounce back fastest from crises aren’t necessarily those with the most servers or the biggest IT budgets – they are the ones that have prepared and practiced for recovery before disaster strikes. Think of disaster recovery drills as fire drills for your digital business: when everyone knows their role and the failover process has been rehearsed, an outage becomes a manageable inconvenience rather than a catastrophic shutdown.

Lesson 3: Build Redundancy – Backups, Failovers, and Maybe Multi-Cloud

The most important technical takeaway from the AWS outage is the value of redundancy. In cloud terms, redundancy means having fallback options: if one system fails, another can take over. There are a few layers to consider:

Data Backups & Recovery: Always maintain recent backups of critical data and have a disaster recovery plan. If your primary cloud database or server becomes unavailable, you should be able to restore your data from a backup in another region or on another system. Equally important, test those backups regularly to ensure you can actually restore them under pressure. Many small businesses perform backups but never try restoring until a crisis – only to find the backups were incomplete or the process was too slow. Don’t let that be you: run fire-drill restorations to verify your data and procedures.
Multi-Zone and Multi-Region Architecture: AWS (and other clouds) offer the ability to distribute workloads across multiple Availability Zones (data centers in the same region) and regions (geographically separate data center clusters). Designing your applications for multi-AZ or multi-region deployment means that a single data center or even an entire region going offline won’t take down your business. As Gartner’s cloud experts put it, “modern cloud-native apps should distribute workloads across multiple availability zones and be ready to fail over quickly to another region when needed “ This limits the “blast radius” of any one outage and reduces downtime because you can switch to a healthy zone/region if one fails. In the AWS outage, companies with true multi-region setups had a better chance of staying online (or recovering faster) than those concentrated solely in the impacted region.
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Strategies: Relying entirely on one vendor can be a vulnerability. Some experts argue that diversifying across cloud providers or blending in on-premise systems is becoming essential for resilience. The idea is that if AWS has an outage, you could fail over to another provider (like Azure or Google Cloud) for critical services, or run some systems locally. For example, you might keep a backup authentication server on a different cloud, or maintain an on-premise copy of vital data. This way, no single outage can halt your operations. Indeed, one recommendation from the recent outage is to “diversify cloud providers, implement redundancy and failover systems” to mitigate future incidents.

However, multi-cloud comes with trade-offs. It can be complex and costly to maintain two parallel infrastructures. Gartner research notes that chasing full multi-cloud resiliency can “introduce technical complexity without truly eliminating systemic risk” in many cases. Not every small business has the resources to run on multiple clouds – and doing so may not be necessary if you can achieve high resilience within one platform. The practical approach for most small businesses is to maximize resilience on your primary platform first. Use multiple regions or zones, add redundancy for critical components, and eliminate single points of failure in your AWS environment (or whatever your main platform is). Ensure that, within AWS, your setup is as robust as possible (e.g. using AWS’s built-in tools for cross-region replication, load balancing, etc.). Once that’s in place, you can evaluate whether certain crucial functions warrant an extra backup on another provider or on-premise.

In summary, redundancy is your best defense against outages. Whether it’s as simple as nightly data backups or as advanced as live multi-cloud failovers, any step that removes a single point of failure will strengthen your business. The statistics back this up: industry data shows that a single-zone cloud setup might suffer ~25 hours of downtime per year, whereas a multi-region deployment cuts that to around 5 hours. The difference could mean being offline for a full day versus just half a business day. Consider the table below, which illustrates how architecture choice impacts downtime:

Cloud Deployment Approach	Approx. Annual Downtime	Resilience Impact
Single Region (Single AZ)	~25 hours per year	High risk – if that one location fails, your service is down until it’s fixed.
Multi-Region (or Multi-AZ)	~5 hours per year	Much lower risk – even if one location fails, another can keep your service running.

Estimates are illustrative; actual downtime varies, but multi-region designs consistently show far less downtime than single-region designs.

Lesson 4: Test Your Business Continuity Plan Regularly

Having backups and redundant systems is only half the battle. The other half is making sure your team knows how to use them when an outage strikes. This AWS incident reinforces that business continuity plans must be tested, rehearsed, and kept up to date.

Ask yourself: if your primary systems went down right now, do you have a clear, tested procedure to get things running again within minutes or hours? Do your employees know who would do what, and how to communicate with customers during the downtime? If these answers are hazy, it’s time to put your plan to the test.

Best practices for testing your continuity plan include:

Regular “fire drills”: Schedule quarterly or at least annual drills where you simulate a cloud outage or other IT disaster. During a drill, actually perform a failover: switch your application to the backup system or restore a backup to a fresh environment. Time how long it takes and note any snags. These exercises ensure that when a real incident occurs, it’s not the first time your team is executing the recovery steps. As one analysis noted, teams that test their recovery workflows “already know how long it takes to switch regions or restore backups, and they identify gaps before real customers notice them.”
Verify RTO and RPO: In disaster recovery planning, RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the target time to restore service, and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the amount of data you could afford to lose (e.g. if backups run every hour, you might have an RPO of 1 hour). Make sure these objectives are defined for your business and actually met in practice. For instance, if your goal is to be back online within 60 minutes of an outage, does your drill show that’s feasible? If not, identify what needs improvement – maybe your database backup takes 3 hours to restore, or DNS changes took too long to propagate, etc. Adjust your strategy (or invest in better tools) until your recovery objectives are consistently achievable.
Keep runbooks and contacts up-to-date: A runbook is a step-by-step guide for handling incidents. Ensure yours is current and accessible even if your primary systems are down. Include contact information for key personnel, vendors, or service providers. If AWS is down, do you have the phone number or secondary email of your cloud support rep or IT provider? Don’t rely on an online document that might be inaccessible; keep an offline copy of critical instructions.
Communication plan: Decide how you will inform customers, stakeholders, and employees during an outage. Preparing some pre-drafted outage messages can save precious time. During the AWS outage, companies that communicated promptly and transparently retained more goodwill. Providing real-time updates and reassurance about service restoration is key. For example, posting on social media or sending an email to customers acknowledging the issue and that your team is on it can greatly reduce confusion. The worst thing is radio silence – that erodes trust faster than the outage itself.

By testing and refining these processes, you transform an outage from a panicky mystery into a familiar challenge that you know how to handle. Business continuity shouldn’t be theoretical; it should be a practiced routine. Think of it like a sports team rehearsing plays so that on game day, everyone executes smoothly. In the context of IT: practice outages make actual outages far less painful.

Lesson 5: Reevaluate Risk Management – It’s Not Just About Cost

Many small businesses make technology decisions with cost as the top concern. Cloud services are often chosen because they’re cost-effective: you pay for what you use, avoid big upfront hardware expenses, etc. However, the AWS outage highlighted the importance of also asking: “What is the cost of NOT having redundancy or a fallback?” In other words, shift your focus from purely cost optimization to risk optimization.

It’s understandable for a small business with tight budgets to cut corners – maybe you run everything in a single cloud region, or you haven’t invested in a comprehensive backup solution because it seems expensive or rarely used. This event is a reminder that those choices carry their own risk costs. Saving a few hundred dollars a month by not having a backup server or a secondary cloud provider might seem wise until an outage suddenly costs you thousands in lost business.

Consider some scenarios:

Website downtime: If your online store brings in $1,000 of revenue per hour, a 5-hour outage could mean $5,000 in direct lost sales, not counting the customers who might not come back. Was skipping a $200/month backup hosting service worth that risk?
Data loss or sync delays: If your only database is in one region and it goes down, even temporarily, you might lose transactions or data updates. The cost to recover data or reconcile inconsistencies can be huge – not to mention the damage if something is permanently lost. Investing in a real-time replica or backup could save you from that nightmare.
Customer trust and SLA penalties: If you’ve promised your clients a certain level of service (uptime SLA) or if your reputation hinges on reliability, one outage can tarnish that. You might have to offer refunds, discounts, or public apologies. These are tangible and intangible costs that come from under-investing in resilience.

Leading organizations now approach cloud spending with a balance: they still care about efficiency, but they prioritize spending in areas that reduce the risk of major failures. As one commentary put it, the question is no longer “How much does it cost to run?” but rather “How much will it cost us if this fails?”. For a small business, this doesn’t mean you must blow up your IT budget overnight. It means identify your critical business processes – the ones that would be most damaging if they go down – and ensure you’ve allocated sufficient resources to protect them. Maybe you increase your cloud plan to include multi-zone deployment for your customer-facing app. Maybe you subscribe to a managed backup service for your customer database. Perhaps you spend a little more on a second internet provider for your office so you’re not completely offline if one ISP has issues. These moves might raise costs marginally, but they significantly lower the risk of an expensive failure.

In essence, view resilience as an investment and even a competitive advantage, not just an expense. Companies that can weather storms while others go down will earn a reputation for reliability. It’s been noted that cloud resilience is now a market differentiator – clients and partners want to know, “Can you stay online when others can’t?”. If you can confidently answer yes (and back it up because you’ve made the right preparations), your business stands out in a positive way.

Lesson 6: Cloud Still Makes Sense – But Be Prepared and Demanding

After a high-profile outage, some business owners might wonder, “Is the cloud too risky? Should we go back to in-house servers?” The short answer from experts: cloud services are still extremely reliable overall, but you must use them wisely. Don’t let a headline-making outage scare you away from the cloud’s many benefits. Instead, use it as motivation to strengthen your relationship with the cloud:

Stick with Cloud, But Architect for Resilience: The AWS outage wasn’t proof that cloud computing is broken – in fact, it underscored patterns that have been seen before and addressed over time. All major cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) have had incidents; none offers 100% uptime. The key is that these providers also offer tools to mitigate such incidents if users leverage them correctly (multi-AZ, multi-region, backups, etc.). Public cloud remains one of the best options for scalable, flexible IT infrastructure if you invest upfront in a resilient design. Don’t abandon ship; rather, fortify your ship.
Hold Providers Accountable: One positive outcome of these incidents is that cloud vendors become more transparent about their weaknesses and improvements. AWS, for example, has been open about its global service dependencies and after a major 2021 outage worked to reduce single points of failure. The fact that October 2025’s issue stayed confined to one region shows progress in fault isolation. As a customer, pay attention to your provider’s post-incident reports and reliability enhancements. Push for clarity on how they’re preventing the same issue from happening again. You’re entrusting them with critical operations, so it’s fair to expect clear communication and continuous improvement.
Plan for “Shared Responsibility”: In cloud, there’s a concept of shared responsibility. The provider manages the infrastructure, but you are responsible for your own continuity on top of that. AWS can promise to do their best to keep services running, but if something goes wrong, your preparedness (or lack thereof) determines your outcome. This means disaster recovery planning is your responsibility. Security of your data backups is your responsibility. Designing a fault-tolerant application is your responsibility. Accepting this mindset will make you less likely to be caught off guard.
Have Manual Workarounds: Despite all the tech solutions, sometimes the answer might be a bit old-fashioned. Ask, if my cloud-based system is completely down, do I have an alternative way to operate temporarily? For example, if your POS system or online order system is unavailable, can staff take orders on paper or via phone as a stopgap? If your primary communication tool (e.g., a cloud email service) is out, do you have a phone tree or an alternate email account (on a different domain or provider) to get messages out? This idea is sometimes called “application substitutability” – having alternative platforms or manual processes ready if the primary fails. While it’s not ideal to run on pen-and-paper or use consumer apps in place of your enterprise software, having these backup workflows could keep your business running during a worst-case scenario. It’s the equivalent of having a spare tire in the trunk; you hope not to use it, but you’re glad it’s there.

In summary, cloud computing remains a powerful tool for small businesses, often providing reliability and capabilities one could never achieve alone. But outages like this remind us that cloud is not a silver bullet – you have to engage with it as an active manager, not a passive consumer. Use the cloud, but plan for the day it doesn’t work. If you do that, you’ll reap the cloud’s benefits while significantly reducing the risks.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: What exactly caused the AWS outage in October 2025?
A: Amazon reported that the outage stemmed from an “operational issue” in its US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region, related to DNS (Domain Name System) services. Essentially, the system that helps AWS services find each other’s addresses failed, leading to increased error rates and latency across many AWS services. This DNS failure particularly impacted AWS’s internal DynamoDB database endpoints and other core coordination services, which in turn cascaded into widespread outages.

Q: How widespread was the impact of this AWS outage? Did it affect small businesses?
A: The impact was global and multi-industry. Dozens of popular websites, applications, and online games went down or experienced major issues – from big names like Amazon’s own services, Snapchat, Netflix and Fortnite, to numerous smaller apps and tools. Millions of users were affected worldwide. Many small businesses felt the pain indirectly: for instance, if you run a storefront on Shopify or Etsy, those platforms faced checkout failures; if you rely on online payment processors or SaaS platforms internally, those might have been unavailable. A telling metric: monitoring sites saw an explosion of problem reports (one source noted about 50,000+ complaints across services in a short time) as the outage rippled through “multiple sectors globally.”In short, yes – small businesses were absolutely affected, either through the tools they use or through their own cloud-based websites going offline.

Q: Were any data or security breaches reported during this outage?
A: There were no reports of data loss or security breaches due to the outage. The incident was an availability failure, not a hack or data compromise. For example, popular services like Coinbase assured users that their funds and data remained safe despite the downtime. The outage was essentially a massive service disruption, but once services recovered, data integrity was intact. That said, it’s a good reminder that part of being prepared is having secure, up-to-date backups – not because AWS lost data (they didn’t in this case), but because in any IT disruption, there’s always a non-zero chance of data corruption. Backups protect you in those one-off scenarios and give peace of mind.

Q: Should my business consider leaving AWS or the cloud because of this?
A: For most, no – don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Cloud outages are headline-grabbing, but they remain rare relative to the overall uptime that major providers offer. Every big cloud (AWS, Azure, Google) has had outages; none is immune. If you moved back to traditional on-premise servers, you would be trading one set of challenges for another (hardware failures, limited scalability, needing 24/7 in-house support, etc.). Instead of abandoning the cloud, the better strategy is to use cloud smarter. Implement the lessons discussed above: add redundancy, back up your data in multiple places, maybe diversify critical components across providers, and have a continuity plan.

Cloud providers will learn from this outage and improve – AWS has already made architectural changes after past incidents to isolate failures. The key is you should also improve your own usage of the cloud in parallel. That being said, it’s wise not to put all your eggs in one basket. If you were considering a multi-cloud or hybrid approach for strategic reasons (compliance, performance, etc.), this incident might reinforce those reasons. But do it because it fits your business needs and risk profile, not simply due to panic. In summary: continue leveraging cloud, but demand reliability (from your provider and from your own IT strategy) and prepare for the occasional rainy day.

Q: What are the top things a small business can do to protect itself from future cloud outages?
A: To recap the most actionable steps for a small business:

Regular Backups in Multiple Locations: Maintain recent backups of your critical data and systems, stored in a different region or a different platform. Verify you can restore them quickly. This protects you if a cloud region is down or if any data gets corrupted during an incident.
Redundant Infrastructure for Key Services: If you run a customer-facing application, consider using multiple availability zones or regions to host it. At minimum, ensure your cloud resources are in an auto-scaling group or failover cluster so that if one instance or location fails, another can pick up the load.
Monitoring and Alerts: Use monitoring tools that will alert you immediately if your service goes down or if any dependent service (like your cloud database or third-party API) is having problems. Early awareness gives you a head start in executing your response plan.
Communication Plan for Outages: Draft templates for how you’ll communicate with customers during an outage. Include multiple channels (social media, email, status page) since one channel might itself be affected. Clear, timely communication can preserve trust.
Test, Test, Test: As emphasized, regularly simulate failures. Don’t wait for a real outage to discover that your backup server wasn’t properly configured.
Consider a Cloud Audit or Consultation: It can be very useful to have an expert review your setup for single points of failure. Managed service providers (like CrossAction) offer assessments to identify where your business is vulnerable and how to fix it. Sometimes a few small architectural tweaks can drastically improve your resilience.

Each business will have a slightly different plan based on its technology and customers, but the goal is the same: ensure that a single infrastructure outage cannot knock you completely offline. You want to be the business that stays up when others go down, or at least one that recovers so quickly that your customers barely notice.

Finding the Next Steps in Protection

The AWS outage of October 2025 was an unpleasant reminder that even the mightiest infrastructure can falter. For small business owners, it served as both a warning and an opportunity. The warning: outages will happen, and they can impact you directly. The opportunity: by learning from these incidents, you can fortify your business IT strategy and differentiate yourself as a reliable, prepared company.

We’ve covered how to interpret the outage and translate it into actionable steps: invest in resilience, practice your recovery plan, balance cost with risk, and maintain perspective that cloud is still your friend when used properly. The “lessons learned” boil down to a simple philosophy: hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. In practical terms, that means building your digital operations in a way that anticipates failures and handles them gracefully when they occur.

If all this feels overwhelming, remember that you don’t have to go it alone. This is where a trusted IT partner can be invaluable. Engaging with experts – for example, having Crossaction review your cloud architecture or help implement a robust backup and failover solution – can take the burden off your shoulders. Crossaction specializes in small business IT support, including cloud management, cybersecurity, data backup, and disaster recovery planning. We can help you assess your current setup, identify vulnerabilities, and put in place cost-effective measures so that an AWS outage (or any IT crisis) doesn’t catch your business off guard.

In the end, outages like AWS’s are not the end of the world; they’re a prompt for all of us to refine our strategies and strengthen our systems. Small businesses that heed these lessons will be better prepared to serve their customers consistently, rain or shine. By taking action now – whether it’s updating your backup routine or consulting professionals for an IT resilience audit – you’ll gain peace of mind that your business can weather the next cloud storm. In the cloud era, resilience is a choice. Make that choice today, and turn this outage’s lessons into your company’s competitive edge.