On October 20, 2025, the cloud world paused for a moment. Millions of apps and websites went down, from Amazon’s own retail site to social media platforms like Snapchat and services like Robinhood and Coinbase. The cause? A disruption in AWS’s US East-1 region, which affected critical services including DynamoDB, EC2, and S3.
Having spent over a decade leading engineering and DevOps teams at Bacancy, I’ve witnessed outages before. But this one was different. The scale, speed, and breadth of impact highlighted vulnerabilities that many organizations still don’t prepare for. If there’s one thing this outage makes clear, it’s that relying on the cloud without a plan is a risk no business should take lightly.
Here’s what I learned from watching this incident unfold and what every engineering and business team should consider.
Top 10 Lessons from the Global AWS Outage in October 2025
Here are the key lessons that unfold from the AWS outage we just witnessed:
1. Understand the Scale and Scope
When an outage hits a major cloud provider like AWS, the ripple effects are immediate. Services relying on DynamoDB saw latency spikes; apps depending on EC2 and S3 struggled to respond.
From a business perspective, the impact was enormous. For example, Robinhood experienced transaction delays that frustrated users, while HMRC’s website in the UK became temporarily unavailable for tax-related queries. Social apps like Snapchat and Slack reported service interruptions, affecting millions of users.
The lesson here is clear: don’t underestimate the reach of cloud dependency. Even if your service seems isolated, chances are some of your tools or partners rely on the same cloud infrastructure. Mapping dependencies is no longer optional; it’s critical for planning continuity.
2. Multi-Region Deployments Are Not Optional
One of the biggest reasons this outage caused so much disruption was regional dependency. Many applications were deployed in a single region—US East-1—and had no automatic failover to other regions.
In my experience, I’ve seen startups and mid-size businesses skip multi-region deployments to save costs, assuming “AWS won’t fail.” This outage proves otherwise.
The practical takeaway: architect your critical systems across multiple regions. It doesn’t have to be all services everywhere, but even partial redundancy can drastically reduce downtime. Active-active setups, or at minimum active-passive failovers, should be a default for production workloads.
3. Redundancy at Every Layer
It’s not just about regions. Redundancy matters at every level: network, storage, application, and database. During this outage, services like Coinbase and Ring were affected because they didn’t have sufficient fallback mechanisms in place.
Redundancy isn’t just a tech checkbox—it’s a mindset. When designing applications, always ask: “If this component fails, what happens to the end-user experience?” At Bacancy, we implement redundancy for databases, microservices, and API gateways, ensuring that no single failure brings the whole system down.
4. Real-Time Monitoring Saves Hours
AWS publishes service status updates, but relying solely on those is not enough. Internal monitoring often reveals issues faster and more precisely.
During the outage, teams without robust monitoring only realized there was a problem when users started reporting errors. That wasted valuable response time.
My recommendation: set up real-time monitoring dashboards with alerting for latency spikes, request failures, and service health. Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or CloudWatch can be configured to trigger immediate notifications. Having eyes on your system 24/7 reduces downtime and helps teams act quickly.
5. Regularly Test Your Disaster Recovery Plans
Outages like this expose gaps in disaster recovery (DR) planning. Organizations that had DR plans but never tested them struggled to execute failover or recovery effectively.
In our engineering teams, we treat DR drills like a quarterly fire drill. We simulate real outages, validate backup restoration, and even practice cross-region failover. Doing this repeatedly ensures that, when an actual outage occurs, teams know what to do without improvising.
6. Over-Reliance on a Single Provider Is Risky
This incident underscores a fundamental truth: no cloud provider is immune to outages. Even AWS, the largest provider, had a significant failure.
For businesses, this is a call to evaluate multi-cloud or hybrid strategies. Even if you stay mostly on AWS, having critical services on a secondary cloud or on-prem failover can prevent catastrophic downtime. The goal isn’t to be paranoid; it’s to be resilient.
7. Understand Your Cloud SLA
One of the lessons many organizations learned during this outage is that SLAs don’t cover all business losses. Downtime in US East-1 caused disruptions that impacted revenue, user trust, and operations—far beyond what AWS SLA credits would cover.
As an engineering leader, I always recommend reviewing SLAs carefully. Know what your provider guarantees, and build additional resilience where the SLA falls short. This could be redundancy, failover, or managed services, depending on your business needs.
8. Prepare Your Team for Outages
Technical preparation isn’t enough; your team must be ready. Incident response needs defined roles, communication channels, and escalation protocols.
During this outage, companies with clear incident response plans moved faster, communicated with stakeholders efficiently, and minimized downtime. Those without plans were scrambling, sending emails and Slack messages in chaos.
A simple takeaway: document your outage playbook and ensure every engineer and manager knows their role. Conduct tabletop exercises to simulate outages and make the process second nature.
9. Learn from Others’ Failures
Not all companies were affected equally. Some recovered quickly because of proactive multi-region deployments and tested DR plans. Observing these differences provides valuable insight: downtime is often avoidable with the right preparation.
When reviewing incidents, look beyond your own failures. Understand what worked for others and adapt it. Whether it’s logging, redundancy, or failover strategies, lessons learned elsewhere can save your business hours or even days of downtime.
10. Invest in Cloud Expertise
Finally, this outage reinforces the importance of experience. Skilled engineers who understand cloud architecture, dependencies, and best practices make the difference between rapid recovery and prolonged downtime.
Businesses should hire AWS developers or consult with experienced cloud teams. Managed services or expert guidance can help build a resilient infrastructure, ensure proper monitoring, and avoid mistakes that cost both time and money.
Conclusion
The AWS outage of 2025 showed how quickly even well-architected systems can be affected when a major cloud provider experiences issues. From my perspective leading engineering teams, the key takeaway is that preparation is everything. Redundancy, multi-region deployments, monitoring, and disaster recovery plans are not optional; they are essential for keeping applications running reliably.
Teams that invest time in building resilient systems and preparing for outages will reduce downtime, protect users, and avoid the scramble that comes when things go wrong. If your team lacks the experience or bandwidth to handle this, bringing in experts or leveraging AWS consulting services to review your architecture and practices can help ensure your systems remain stable under pressure.
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