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Note – This post is my own views and opinions

On the afternoon of 20/10/25, as I was about to start playing some of my phone games, I got a weird failed to start up message. This start up message was one I’ve never seen before. Ok I’ll log in later then. So I wanted to do some study and watch some tutorials on my online course app, so I opened that as well. Wa-la, it opened, so I went to my financial literacy course and opened the last video I was up to. I waited patiently while the video was buffering, during this time I was in front of my PC just bumming around reading the latest news. After a few minutes my video was not buffering. I opened the video again and still it wasn’t working. Two apps in succession was not working. That was weird. A few hours later I got slack message from my co-worker on our project collaboration channel, saying AWS had some outage and was down. Little did I know at that point did I know the severe impact it actually had across the globe.

No doubt you (being an IT professional 🙂 ) would have heard the AWS issue on the evening of 20/10/25 or early morning of 19/10/25 (which ever part of the world you we’re in at the time).

I never experienced an AWS outage like this one before. I’m sure there would have been other events like this in the past, but at the time of writing none pops up. The only significant issue that I can compare this to is the CrowdStrike issue last year in 2024 (and that one was bad!). I heard the us-east-1 region was made unavailable due to a DNS issue and affected several AWS services (according to the multiple reports).

I searched online and on my socials and there I saw complaints and chats when an outage occurs. I saw some of the largest tech, entertainment and gaming firms get affected. I saw reports from publications, TV networks and more, report on this outage. Only then and there did I understand the magnitude of the impact. During this time, I was just wondering how is it that a company like AWS has an outage this impacting but more astonishing lasting for so many hours? Surely they would have some backup or redundancy in place to redirect traffic if an occurrence like this would happen (yep you got me. I’m no network engineer and I’m not privy to the system setup and architecture of AWS DNS). But no there wasn’t. All of society had to wait until AWS restored services.

I want to share below my thoughts on this event. I’m not going to entertain ‘why it happened’, but another perspective and view, and no AWS isn’t the only one that will get a mention.

• Where was the backup or redundancy process for AWS in an event like this?
  • Where was the backup or redundancy process for the firms affected in an event like this?
    • Is it costly to have no backup or redundancy process?
    • Is the investment not there? If not why?
    • Is the knowledge and expertise there to actually scope this
    • I.e. Could AWS not have moved client’s systems and traffic to another region? us-west-1, or was us-east-2 operational?
      • I know that you do need actually setup routing and your app’s separately on another region
• What is the cost of not having a redundancy or backup system?
  • Is the cost of customers being offline less than not investing in a backup or redundancy system?
• Are those affected financially covered?
  • There would have been lost revenues during this time
  • The word ‘compensation’ no doubt will start or has already started to pop up
    • How does one calculate compensation during an event like this?
      • Do customers or vendors get a discount or refund for the time being offline?
        • Who pays for the discount or refund? AWS or the firm affected using AWS?
          • Is there a process for discount or refund? If so what is it? Do affected customers and firms, know what they are entitled to? Probably not, because there is fine print buried somewhere which no one knows about
• There will be some firms considering a thought of moving to another cloud provider because of this experience
  • This is even worst because that other cloud provider will probably some issue down the track

I’ve listed a few questions which I’ll probably not get the answer to and I don’t expect to get an answer. That’s the IT industry. Getting proper technical and concise answers to events like this, is like drawing water from a stone. But if you are a buddying business person / group, company, firm using AWS. Ask yourself the above. Because if you do pursue the route of being in the Cloud you will get affected by an issue in the future.

Summary:

• What are your backup procedures for your IT systems
  • Is the cost less to your business but customers not being able to access your systems or will the cost be alot if you can’t operate?
• What are your right’s as a client if a major vendor or system is unavailable?
  • Do you have it in writing?