When AWS Goes Down: Why Hybrid‑Cloud and Backup Are Non‑Negotiable
Oct 22, 2025
On Monday, October 20, 2025, a significant outage in AWS’s US‑EAST‑1 region (Northern Virginia) knocked services offline across industries. A DNS-resolution issue affecting DynamoDB—a core AWS database—triggered cascading failures across critical components like Lambda, EC2, IAM, and network load balancers. The result? A ripple effect that disrupted digital services globally for several hours.
What Went Down?
- Downtime spanned over 3 hours, starting around 3:00 a.m. ET, with recovery still ongoing several hours later.
- Over 6 million incident reports surged on platforms like Downdetector.
- Affected services included: Snapchat, Reddit, Slack, Signal, Fortnite, Roblox, Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Chime, Canva, Hulu, Prime Video, Alexa, Ring, and many more.
Why It Matters to You
- Cloud Doesn’t Guarantee Uptime: Even Tier 1 providers like AWS are vulnerable to single‑region failure.
- Resilience Requires Redundancy: Most outages originate in US‑EAST‑1—the same region impacted in previous years.
- Internal Issues Could Be Worse: Experts warn that targeted attacks could cause even more damage.
Lessons from October 20: Architect for Failure
- Escape single-region dependency: Distribute services across multiple regions, clouds, or on-prem systems.
- Ensure data resilience: Use cross-region replication.
- Isolate critical networking: Diversify network entry points using load balancers and edge-proxy nodes.
- Operate expecting failure: Simulate outages in drills; monitor availability and latency in real-time.
How IPM Keeps You Online When AWS Doesn’t
At IPM, we understand that every minute offline can cost revenue, reputation, or compliance. That’s why we’ve developed tailored solutions that integrate seamlessly with your infrastructure.
Our Key Services
- Hybrid‑Cloud Architecture: We configure deployments across cloud and on-prem to balance performance and redundancy.
- Automated Backup & Disaster Recovery: Regular, encrypted backups with orchestrated DR plans ensure rapid failover and secure data recovery.
- DRaaS & Compliance Alignment: We help businesses meet regulatory needs (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX) with strong DR solutions.
- Performance Optimization & Single-Point Risk Reduction: We eliminate chokepoints that can bring everything down.
In Real Terms - No more catastrophic service interruptions from reliance on a single cloud region.
- Faster RTO/RPO via failover support.
- Compliance protection through resilience-by-design.
- Customized resilience strategies that match your business continuity needs.
Your Next Move: Free IT Resilience Assessment
AWS’s outage is your wake-up call. If your business can’t afford service disruption, ask us:
- How reliable is your current cloud setup?
- Do you have a tested failover plan?
- Could you recover quickly in the event of a region-wide cloud outage?
Our no-cost, no‑commitment IT Resilience Assessment will pinpoint vulnerabilities and show how IPM can strengthen your continuity plan.
Contact us today to ensure your systems stay live—even when AWS doesn’t.
Bottom line: This outage wasn’t just AWS’s problem—it’s a reminder that cloud providers don’t architect for failure. IPM builds IT environments that do.