Earlier today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage in the US East (US-EAST-1) region that rippled across industries worldwide. Apps, websites, and services we rely on every day, from Fortnite and Snapchat to Signal, Alexa, and even HMRC in the UK, were offline or severely impacted.
While AWS is one of the largest, most mature cloud platforms on the planet, today’s incident reminds us that even the best technology isn’t immune to failure. If your business relies heavily on a SINGLE cloud provider, the impact can be immediate, disruptive, and costly.
So, what can we learn from today’s AWS outage, and how can businesses prepare for the next inevitable outage?
The Reality of “Single-Point-of-Failure”
If you host nearly everything on one platform, an outage in a key region or service can take down multiple systems simultaneously. The fallout isn’t limited to “servers offline”, transactions fail, users can’t log in, data writes may queue or fail, and customer trust is tested.
Large cloud providers like AWS advertise high availability and reliability. And for the most part, these claims hold true. But today reminds us that even the best providers experience failures, and the effect can cascade far beyond the initial problem.
AWS itself publishes summaries of past incidents, showing that even minor misconfigurations or region-level faults can affect thousands of businesses. And history is full of examples, take the June 13, 2023 AWS outage, which caused a global domino effect across multiple services.
Why All Your Eggs in One Basket Is Risky
Today’s outage highlights some key risks of relying exclusively on a single cloud provider:
- Concentration Risk – Relying on a single platform, even a giant like AWS, exposes your business to the risk of regional or service-specific failures.
- Ripple Effects – AWS powers countless downstream services, so when it’s down, it doesn’t look like “just AWS” – your applications, APIs, and even connected services can fail.
- False Sense of Security – High SLAs and multi-region capabilities are reassuring, but no system is infallible. Faults happen.
- Operational Costs of Downtime – Downtime isn’t just technical. It can mean lost revenue, frustrated customers, and time-consuming recovery processes.
- Performance Issues During Partial Failures – Even when services are technically “up,” latency and degraded performance can disrupt operations and user experience.
The lesson is simple: no platform, however powerful, should be the single backbone of your operations.
Lessons Learned: How to Build Resilience
So, what practical steps can businesses take to mitigate these risks?
- Recognise the Shared Risk
Using AWS or another major public cloud provider is common practice – the scale, features, and global presence of these services is unmatched. But recognise that your business shares risk with every other customer on the platform. Treat this as you would any critical dependency: not optional, but strategic.
- Diversify Your Infrastructure
Redundancy is key. Here’s how:
Secondary Provider: Keep a smaller, hands-on provider for critical workloads or failover capability. Even a modest cloud provider can be a lifeline if your primary platform goes down.
Region Diversification: Spread workloads across multiple regions and availability zones. Within AWS this reduces risk, but consider a second smaller cloud provider such as vXtream for true multi-cloud resilience.
Containerisation & Abstraction: Technologies like containers, infrastructure-as-code, and orchestration tools can make failover smoother and less manual.
- Test Your Failover Plans
It’s not enough to have a backup. You must test it regularly:
• Simulate outages and see how quickly systems can failover.
• Prioritise critical workloads like payments or login systems.
• Evaluate the costs of downtime versus the costs of redundancy, in some cases a small extra investment is worth the potential protection.
- Monitor Continuously
Proactive monitoring is essential:
• Keep an eye on platform status dashboards like AWS Health Dashboard.
• Track latency, error rates, and performance degradation, sometimes these are early warnings of a larger problem.
• Prepare for the post-outage backlog: even after the cloud provider restores services, queued requests and delayed data processing can impact your operations.
- Understand Dependencies
Know what your applications depend on:
Many AWS services are interconnected and a fault in one can affect several others.
When using a smaller provider for redundancy, understand their capabilities and limitations. Make sure workloads can realistically failover without complex reconfiguration.
The Business Takeaway
If your business relies exclusively on AWS, today is a moment to reflect. Ask yourself: What happens if a critical region fails? Can my most important workloads continue running elsewhere? Are my customers, partners, and stakeholders protected from downtime?
This isn’t a call to abandon AWS. Far from it. The platform is robust, innovative, and indispensable for many organisations. But putting all your eggs in one basket is risky. By combining AWS with a smaller, more hands-on provider, and by implementing robust multi-region strategies, businesses can ensure continuity and resilience.
Responsiveness
While large-scale outages like AWS’s can ripple across industries, smaller or regional cloud providers, such as vXtream will often demonstrate quicker responsiveness in such situations. Streamlined support channels, more localised infrastructure, and closer client relationships can make mitigation and recovery faster – providing an interesting perspective on why diversifying providers can strengthen operational resilience.
Final Thought
Resilience isn’t about perfection. It’s about preparation, planning, and redundancy. Today’s AWS outage is a reminder that even the best providers can fail, and the impact is real.
Use AWS, embrace its power and scale, but don’t let it be your single source of truth. Spread your risk, plan your failover, and keep your critical operations insulated from the next outage.
After all, downtime isn’t just technical; it’s a business risk. The companies that plan for it today will be the ones that thrive tomorrow.
Pairing AWS with vXtream ensures your critical applications stay online, even during major outages. With fast response times, seamless integration, and flexible, cost-effective solutions, vXtream is your perfect cloud partner to boost resilience and maintain continuity.
Start planning your multi-cloud strategy today – don’t wait for the next outage – get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.
Comments are closed.