Major Cloud Service Outage Highlights Tech Reliance For Businesses

Early Monday morning (10/20/25) at approximately 3:10 AM, Amazon Web Services had what would charitably be called a severe outage. keeping in mind that amazon web services is the largest provider of cloud services worldwide, this was definitely a serious issue. Happily, those of us on the West Coast didn't experience much in the way of disruptions. 

Hours later, Amazon Web Services said that most users were back up and running, but there were some that were still being affected while trying to connect with rented servers. The East Coast was having several issues with connectivity. 

To put this into perspective, Amazon Web Services provides about a third of all Internet cloud services worldwide. 

What exactly happened? 

According to seattletimes.com,
‘AWS said that a digital directory for a key database service malfunctioned, likely causing cascading failures when software reliant on the widely used data trove was unable to retrieve information. The company has since fixed the problem, which hit its operations on the US East Coast, AWS’s largest cluster of data centers. Some users might see slower responses or increased error rates during the recovery, Amazon said.’ 

Most companies that were impacted by the dare, I say, outage say that they're functioning well now, but some users are still cautious, keeping an eye on the system to make sure it's operating properly. 

The last time an outage like this occurred with Amazon Web Services was back in 2021 and impacted users as diverse as Theme parks to robot vacuums. Happily, most glitches can be fixed pretty quickly, but because of the interconnectivity of the Internet, some companies depend on other companies to the point where if one company has an Internet failure, it crashes several other companies at the same time. 

A bad software patch last year being used by CrowdStrike Holdings Incorporated crashed digital systems around the world. 

For better or worse, businesses are now inextricably linked with the Internet to a point where some businesses cannot operate without it, and I'm not talking about giant companies now; I'm talking about small businesses. 10 or 15 years ago with our excitement to move forward with all these new technologies, we didn't realize we were painting ourselves into a technological corner.  

For the most part, I'm not yearning for the good old days before the Internet, but maybe we should think twice before we decide to hitch our cart into the next technological craze.
Amazon Says Issues Still Affect AWS Service After Fixing Outage | The Seattle Times