Recent Amazon Web Services outage illustrates how reliant we are on the cloud
AWS: The October 2025 outage lasted 15 hours and impacted over 2,500 companies
(InvestigateTV) — A recent widespread Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted popular apps and sites – including Snapchat, Reddit, and some banking and streaming services – before service steadied.
“You really realize early on how integrated cloud communications is to our everyday lives,” said Stephen Hilt, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro.
“Services that you may actually rely on are actually impacted by these outages.”
The cloud, of which AWS is an important part, is a mystery to many, but at a basic level, it is shared storage for files and programs that can be accessed by users with an internet connection.
“The cloud is a homogeneous infrastructure that resides somewhere else. So, we used to have data centers in-house with AWS or other providers out there,” Hilt explained.
“They’re hosting that service, that server, those applications are somewhere else.”
He said over time, many of the apps and services we use have migrated to cloud infrastructure – often in a single region – which means a problem in one place can ripple out quickly.
“It is integrated into our everyday lives, to parts where you don’t even probably realize that if there is a major cloud outage, those services stop working,” he noted.
Hilt said companies need a backup plan – not just one cloud to lean on.
They should prepare for the worst-case scenario and be prepared.
While fixing the root problems is up to providers, consumers can still prepare. Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog with US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), suggested having a backup way to access your accounts.
“It’s really important for people to keep tabs on their passwords, so if the app isn’t working for whatever reason – because of a big outage or just because – then they should be able to have another way to log in,” she advised.
Murray also noted that scammers often exploit big outages and warned consumers to be wary of “account recovery” texts or emails and to go directly to the company’s website or app instead.
Amazon said a DNS error in its database systems triggered the outage, which then spread to other services.
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