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

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

On October 20, 2025, a major outage in the AWS US-EAST-1 region disrupted leading digital platforms and exposed critical gaps in cloud architecture and disaster recovery (DR) strategies. This incident highlights that relying on cloud simplicity is not enough—true operational resilience demands proactive preparation.

In this on-demand session, Roger Mcilmoyle breaks down the root causes and impact of the outage, offering actionable insights to help you strengthen your DR and business continuity (BC) plans.

You’ll learn:

What really happened—and why it matters for every cloud-reliant organization
Key lessons to fortify your disaster recovery and business continuity strategies
Immediate steps you can take to reduce your risk
Strategic recommendations to boost resilience and confidence in your recovery readiness

Don’t wait for the next outage to test your preparedness. Watch now to take control of your operational resilience and safeguard your business from future disruptions.

Interested in meeting with a business resilience expert?

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.

AWS Outage FAQ

It can—costs may double or even slightly exceed that, depending on your disaster recovery (DR) architecture and recovery time objectives. However, costs can be optimized by using warm or semi-warm infrastructure for non-critical layers (e.g., front-end, application tier) and leveraging auto-scaling groups. Understanding your dependency maps is key to efficient design.

Not quite. While some services like databases may support straightforward replication, others require full architectural setup in the second region. You must consider how each service interacts with your infrastructure and adapt your change control processes accordingly.

Use application dependency mapping tools that monitor data flows. These tools help track changes and uncover unintended complexity, especially during migrations. They’re lightweight and compatible with most cloud and on-prem environments.

Application dependency mapping software is your best option. It reveals hidden dependencies—like critical Excel sheets pulling data from SaaS apps—that may not be obvious to IT teams. Monitoring actual data flows is essential.

Ask for documentation on multi-region and multi-AZ architecture, certifications, compliance frameworks, and DR testing reports. However, note that vendors may delay declaring a disaster due to the complexity of failover and failback processes. Always have a business continuity plan in place.

Related Resources

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

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Disaster Recovery Assessment Datasheet

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