When the Cloud Goes Dark: Disaster Recovery Lessons from the AWS Outage

By Roger McIlmoyle October 21, 2025

On October 20, 2025, a major AWS outage rocked the US-EAST-1 region, causing elevated error rates and latency across key AWS services. This widespread cloud disruption impacted numerous customer-facing applications and platforms, highlighting critical vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure and disaster recovery (DR) strategies.

For businesses relying on cloud computing, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), or managed cloud services, this event serves as a vital wake-up call: operational simplicity does not guarantee disaster-proof cloud architecture.

What Happened in the AWS US-EAST-1 Outage?

AWS confirmed that the root cause of the incident originated in the US-EAST-1 region, triggering “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple foundational AWS services. This regional failure cascaded to widely-used platforms such as Snapchat, Signal, Ring, Coinbase Global, and Robinhood Markets, causing service failures and degraded user experiences.

This outage reveals a harsh reality: even the largest cloud providers like AWS are susceptible to regional disruptions, and many cloud architectures wrongly assume the cloud provider will handle disaster recovery end-to-end.

Why Cloud Outages Affect More Than Just Your Infrastructure

Even if your organization’s in-house applications weren’t directly impacted, SaaS platforms you depend on likely were. Since SaaS vendors rely heavily on cloud infrastructure, an underlying cloud failure—like this AWS outage—can disrupt critical services including social media, payments, trading, and education.

This means your business continuity plan must account for upstream dependencies and the risk of cloud service provider outages.

Key Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) Lessons from the AWS Outage

Single-region dependency creates a single point of failure
Relying solely on one AWS region—like US-EAST-1—puts your services at risk if that region suffers an outage.
Single-region dependency creates a single point of failure
Relying solely on one AWS region—like US-EAST-1—puts your services at risk if that region suffers an outage.
Platform services failure affects entire application ecosystems
Outages in identity (IAM/STS), networking (PrivateLink, VPC Lattice), and event systems (Kinesis, EventBridge) can ripple across all applications depending on those services.
Business continuity must assume region-level cloud outages
Modern DR planning requires strategies for multi-region failover, multi-cloud architectures, and on-premises fallback to mitigate provider or region-level failures.
Regular testing and validation beat “enabled features”
Enablement alone isn’t enough. You need ongoing DR drills, failover testing, and continuous validation of your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) metrics.

Immediate Steps for Organizations Impacted by the AWS Outage

A. Conduct a Post-Incident Impact & Exposure Review

Identify affected applications and services.
Map dependencies on AWS services and regions.
Quantify business impact including revenue loss and customer experience degradation.

B. Validate and Update Your Disaster Recovery Plans

Review RTO and RPO targets.
Clarify cloud provider versus customer responsibilities.
Ensure cross-region failover is properly configured and documented.

C. Run a Failover Drill

Simulate regional outages and switch traffic to alternate deployments.
Monitor failover performance and update plans based on findings.

D. Review Contractual SLAs and Architectural Resilience

Understand your cloud provider’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Evaluate investment in multi-region or multi-cloud architectures.

E. Communicate Transparently with Stakeholders

Report incident impact and mitigation steps.
Align budget and roadmap with resilience priorities.

Strategic Long-Term Recommendations for Cloud Resilience

Design cloud architecture to be region-independent and provider-independent.
Perform comprehensive dependency mapping including platform and control plane services.
Integrate continuous DR/BC testing into operations.
Diversify cloud vendors to reduce single-provider risk.
Elevate resilience metrics to executive and board oversight for accountability.

Conclusion: Build Resilience Before the Next Cloud Outage

The October 2025 AWS outage underscores a vital truth: operational simplicity doesn’t mean operational resilience. When a cloud region fails, your business continuity depends on your architecture, processes, and preparedness—not just hope.

Don’t wait for another outage to reveal vulnerabilities. Assess your disaster recovery readiness, validate failover plans, and build resilience across every layer of your cloud stack.

Ready to fortify your disaster recovery and business continuity strategy? Contact Blue Mantis today for a comprehensive DR/BC readiness review and keep your business online—even when the cloud goes dark.

Roger McIlmoyle

Practice Leader, Infrastructure Automation & DevOps

With 30+ years experience across highly diverse industry verticals; government, medical, banking, automotive, food, and manufacturing Roger has provided not only operational excellence but also transformative thought leadership. His career has spanned circuit design, software and operating system design, infrastructure, security and enterprise architecture development. As a result of more than ten years in a senior pre-sales engineering and architecture role with Sungard Availability Services; he has architected, influenced and participated in the implementation and full life-cycle of enterprise IT in a broad range of highly innovative Fortune 500 companies.

Share

State	Types of Residents To Whom The Law Applies	Exceptions For Employment-Related Information
Colorado	An individual who is a Colorado resident acting only in an individual or household context and does not include an individual acting in a commercial or employment context, as a job applicant, or as a beneficiary of someone acting in an employment context.	Data maintained for employment records purposes.
Connecticut	An individual who is a resident of Connecticut and does not include an individual acting in a commercial or employment context or as an employee, owner, director, officer or contractor of a company, partnership, sole proprietorship, nonprofit or government agency whose communications or transactions with us occur solely within the context of that individual’s role with the company, partnership, sole proprietorship, nonprofit or government agency.	Data processed or maintained in the course of an individual applying to, being employed by, or acting as an agent or independent contractor, to the extent that the data is collected and used within the context of that role.
Montana	An individual who is a resident of Montana and does not include an individual acting in a commercial or employment context or as an employee, owner, director, officer, or contractor of a company, partnership, sole proprietorship, nonprofit, or government agency whose communications or transactions with the controller occur solely within the context of that individual’s role with the company, partnership, sole proprietorship, nonprofit, or government agency.	Data processed or maintained in the course of an individual applying to, being employed by, or acting as an agent or independent contractor, to the extent that the data is collected and used within the context of that role.
Oregon	A natural person who resides in Oregon and acts in any capacity other than in a commercial or employment context.	Information processed or maintained solely in connection with, and for the purpose of, enabling an individual’s employment or application for employment; an individual’s ownership of, or function as a director or officer of, a business entity; or an individual’s contractual relationship with a business entity.
Texas	An individual who is a resident of Texas acting only in an individual or household context and does not include an individual acting in a commercial or employment context.	Data processed or maintained in the course of an individual applying to, being employed by, or acting as an agent or independent contractor, to the extent that the data is collected and used within the context of that role.
Utah	An individual who is a resident of Utah acting in an individual or household context and does not include an individual acting in an employment or commercial context.	Data processed or maintained in the course of an individual applying to, being employed by, or acting as an agent or independent contractor, to the extent the collection and use of the data are related to the individual’s role.
Virginia	A natural person who is a resident of Virginia acting only in an individual or household context and does not include a natural person acting in a commercial or employment context.	Data processed or maintained in the course of an individual applying to, being employed by, or acting as an agent or independent contractor, to the extent that the data is collected and used within the context of that role.

By Need

By Industry

By Function

Learn

FEatured Resource