This week reminded us just how connected our digital world really is.
For a few hours, parts of the internet went quiet, websites slowed down, streaming platforms froze, and even smart devices acted up.
The reason? Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the backbone for a huge part of the internet experienced a major outage.
And in that silence, we saw one clear truth:
The cloud isn’t just “important” anymore, it’s essential to how the world runs.
The Ever-Growing Importance of the Cloud
From entertainment to finance to AI, the cloud powers almost everything we touch online.
Instead of owning physical servers, companies rent computing power, databases, and storage from providers like AWS.
That’s how startups scale quickly, global apps handle millions of users, and new ideas come to life faster than ever before.
The cloud gives:
- Scalability: Apps can handle millions of users seamlessly.
- Speed: Developers can deploy features globally in minutes.
- Affordability: Teams only pay for what they use.
- Reliability: Normally, outages are rare and fixed quickly.
But when something goes wrong, like this week — the ripple effects are massive.
What Happened This Week
Around October 20–21, 2025, AWS faced a major disruption that affected thousands of apps and websites worldwide.
The issue started in the US-East-1 region, one of AWS’s busiest hubs. It was reportedly linked to a DNS failure, which caused services to lose access to each other.
Suddenly, millions of users couldn’t use their favorite apps.
Some of the platforms affected included:
- Netflix – struggled with video streaming since it hosts much of its backend on AWS.
- Slack – team chats and file uploads slowed or failed.
- Twitch – streams buffered endlessly because AWS powers its global content delivery.
- Spotify – some users couldn’t log in, as their authentication service depends on AWS databases.
- Amazon’s own services – like Ring and Alexa also went offline briefly.
African Apps Felt It Too
The effects of AWS outages don’t stop at Silicon Valley, they ripple across Africa too.
Many of the continent’s top tech companies rely heavily on AWS infrastructure for everything from payments to data analytics.
For instance:
- Flutterwave uses AWS to handle millions of secure payment transactions daily across multiple African countries.
- Paystack depends on AWS for uptime, scalability, and secure API calls used by thousands of merchants.
- Kuda Bank relies on AWS for reliable customer account management and cloud-based transaction processing.
- Andela and PiggyVest leverage AWS for data storage, analytics, and global-scale web operations.
So, even though these services may seem local, the cloud they’re built on is global.
When AWS sneezes, developers in Lagos, Japan, Nairobi, Australia and Cape Town can catch the cold too.
What AWS Actually Does for These Apps
You might be wondering how much AWS does for these apps, well most people don’t realize just how deeply integrated AWS is into everyday platforms.
Here’s a peek at what AWS provides for these companies:
| App | What AWS Does | AWS Services Commonly Used |
|---|---|---|
| Netflix | Stores, processes, and delivers video content worldwide. | S3 (storage), EC2 (compute), CloudFront (CDN), Lambda |
| Spotify | Handles music streaming, recommendations, and user data. | EC2, DynamoDB, S3, SageMaker |
| Twitch | Powers real-time streaming and chat. | IVS (Interactive Video Service), CloudFront, EC2 |
| Slack | Manages messaging queues and file uploads. | S3, EC2, Elastic Load Balancer, RDS |
| Flutterwave / Paystack | Secure online payments and API integrations. | EC2, Lambda, RDS, CloudTrail, KMS |
| Kuda Bank | Cloud-based banking, fraud monitoring, and data security. | EC2, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, IAM |
So when AWS’s core services go down, even briefly, apps that depend on them lose access to critical functions — databases, authentication, file storage, or live updates.
It’s not that those apps “crashed” — it’s that their digital foundation temporarily disappeared.
What We Can Learn from It
The outage didn’t just highlight AWS’s dominance, it also taught important lessons for developers and businesses:
- Build with redundancy: Use multiple regions or even hybrid clouds for critical features.
- Plan for failure: Design apps that can gracefully handle downtime or degraded performance.
- Know your dependencies: Many apps didn’t even realize which AWS services they were relying on until things broke.
- Communicate early: Transparency keeps users patient and builds trust.
Even AWS itself emphasizes resilience yet, this week showed that in tech, perfection doesn’t exist.
Why AWS Still Matters
Despite the outage, AWS remains the world’s most trusted cloud provider, serving millions of businesses, from startups to giants like Netflix, NASA, Flutterwave, and Airbnb.
Its reliability rate is still over 99.99%, and each outage drives improvements that make the entire ecosystem stronger.
More than that, AWS represents what’s possible in the digital era:
You can get a virtual server up in seconds, launch a global website in hours, and analyze petabytes of data without owning a single piece of hardware.
That’s not just convenience, it’s freedom to innovate and in an ever-growing tech world, such convenience is of great importance.
When AWS went down, it wasn’t just “some company’s problem.”
It was a glimpse of how deeply the cloud underpins our lives, from the music we stream to the devices in our homes, and even the fintech apps we rely on in Africa.
The outage reminded us of something powerful:
The cloud isn’t invisible anymore. It’s the nervous system of the internet.
And as AWS continues to evolve, it’s shaping not just how apps run but how the world runs.
What’s one app that's part of your daily life that was affected?
Let’s talk about it in the comments.
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