The Day the Internet Stopped: Learning from AWS Outage

If your Monday (10/20/2025) felt unusually chaotic—or unusually quiet—you weren't alone. Yesterday's day-long AWS outage served as a stark reminder of just how much our digital world depends on the infrastructure of a few tech giants.

For some, it meant an unexpected break from work or school. For many others, it meant scrambling to explain to customers why websites were down, apps weren't working, and business ground to a halt through no fault of their own. If you were among those dealing with the fallout, we feel you. These outages aren't just technical inconveniences—they're real disruptions that cost businesses money, stress employees, and erode customer trust.

What Happened?

According to Amazon, the issue originated at their US-East-1 data center in Virginia and involved problems with both the domain name system (DNS) and Amazon's DynamoDB database service. Think of DNS as the internet's phone book—it translates the web addresses we type into our browsers into the numerical IP addresses that computers actually use. When that system fails, websites become unreachable, even though they're technically still running.

The ripple effects were widespread and lasted throughout much of the workday, affecting companies and organizations across the country and around the world.

The Fragile Foundation of the Modern Internet

Here's the uncomfortable truth: yesterday's outage is part of a pattern, not an anomaly. AWS experienced a similar incident in 2023. CrowdStrike's faulty update brought down large portions of Microsoft's cloud infrastructure in 2024. When one of the big three cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft, or Google—stumbles, millions feel the impact.

This concentration of power brings genuine benefits. These tech giants offer massive resources, cutting-edge technology, standardization across platforms, and economies of scale that would be impossible for individual companies to replicate. Their infrastructure powers everything from small startups to major enterprises and government services.

But this convenience comes with a cost: fragility through centralization. We've built a digital economy on a surprisingly narrow foundation, and when that foundation cracks, the consequences cascade across industries and borders.

The Challenge for Smaller Organizations

While major enterprises and government agencies often maintain relationships with multiple cloud providers—precisely to avoid being taken offline by a single outage—smaller companies face a different reality. Multi-cloud strategies require significant financial investment and technical expertise. For many small and medium-sized businesses, the cost of maintaining redundant systems across multiple cloud platforms simply isn't feasible.

This creates an uncomfortable dynamic where those with the resources to protect themselves can weather these storms, while smaller organizations remain vulnerable to forces entirely outside their control.

Moving Forward: Practical Solutions

So what can organizations do? While Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will undoubtedly continue to dominate the cloud landscape, there are strategies to build more resilience:

Implement a Multi-Cloud Strategy: For mission-critical operations, consider distributing your infrastructure across two cloud providers. Yes, it's more complex and costly, but the insurance against total shutdown may be worth the investment. Even a partial multi-cloud approach—keeping your most essential services on a secondary provider—can maintain basic operations during an outage.

Bring Critical Systems Back to Earth: Not everything needs to live in the cloud. For truly mission-critical applications and data, consider hybrid solutions that combine cloud benefits with the reliability of managed private physical servers. This approach gives you control over your most essential operations while still leveraging cloud services for less critical functions.

Partner with Infrastructure Experts: Companies like QSS specialize in building holistic, custom-tailored infrastructure solutions that balance cloud convenience with on-premises reliability. These experts can help design systems that match your specific risk profile and budget, rather than forcing you into a one-size-fits-all cloud solution.

Develop Comprehensive Backup Plans: Beyond infrastructure, ensure your organization has clear protocols for outage scenarios. This includes communication plans for customers and employees, manual workarounds for critical processes, and regular testing of backup systems.

The Reality Check

Will yesterday's outage fundamentally change how the internet works? Probably not in the immediate term. The momentum behind the big three cloud providers is powerful, and their services remain essential to modern business operations.

But each outage should prompt us to ask hard questions about resilience, redundancy, and risk. We can't eliminate the possibility of future outages, but we can become more thoughtful about how we build our digital infrastructure and more prepared for when—not if—the next disruption occurs.

Yesterday's outage was a reminder that the cloud, for all its advantages, is still just someone else's computer. And sometimes, those computers go down. The question isn't whether to use cloud services—for most organizations, that ship has sailed. The question is how to use them wisely, with eyes open to both their immense power and their inherent risks.

If yesterday was your wake-up call, now is the time to review your infrastructure strategy. Your future self—and your customers—will thank you.