Major AWS outage disrupts Snapchat, Roblox, Ring, and hundreds more services. It's a reminder that no cloud provider is immune—and why architectural resilience matters more than ever. 

October 20, 2025 - If you tried in vain to check your Ring doorbell, play Fortnite, or access your business applications early this morning, you weren't alone. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the backbone of much of the internet, experienced a significant outage—a stark reminder that even the world's most sophisticated cloud infrastructure can experience disruptions.  

By 3:11 AM ET, AWS's US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia began experiencing what the company called an "operational issue" with DynamoDB, one of its core database services. The cascading failure temporarily impacted over 70 AWS services and left millions of users worldwide unable to access everything from social networks to critical business applications. 

If this feels familiar, it's because cloud outages—across all major providers—are becoming an increasingly important consideration for business continuity planning. 

The Uncomfortable Truth: No Provider Is Immune 

While AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all invest billions in infrastructure reliability and maintain some of the most sophisticated technology platforms on the planet, the reality is that complex distributed systems eventually experience disruptions. It's not a matter of if, but when. 

According to Parametrix's 2024 Cloud Outage Risk Report, critical cloud outages increased by 18% in 2024 compared to 2023, and lasted nearly 19% longer. This isn't a failure of any single provider—it's the nature of operating at massive scale in an increasingly complex technological landscape. 

Recent Disruptions Across the Industry 

All three major cloud providers have experienced notable service disruptions in recent years: 

• AWS has seen several incidents in its critical US-east-1 region, affecting services from EC2 to DynamoDB 

• Google Cloud experienced a significant global outage in June 2025 that lasted over 7 hours 

• Microsoft Azure has dealt with regional outages, including weather-related disruptions and DDoS attacks 

The point isn't to criticize these providers—they remain the most reliable computing infrastructure in human history. Rather, it's to acknowledge that when you're running services at global scale, serving millions of customers, occasional disruptions are inevitable. 

The Real Issue: Most Failures Are Preventable 

Here's the part that should actually concern you: 68% of all cloud outages in 2024 were caused by human error, not sophisticated cyberattacks or catastrophic hardware failures. Configuration mistakes, failed deployments, and cascading failures from routine maintenance are the primary culprits. 

This means that while provider-level outages will occasionally happen, the majority of cloud failures are actually within your control through proper architecture and operational practices. 

Why "Just Use Multiple Clouds" Isn't Always the Answer 

When outages like this happen, the immediate reaction is often: "We need a multi-cloud strategy to eliminate single points of failure!" 

While multi-cloud can provide benefits for certain use cases, it's not a silver bullet—and for many organizations, it introduces more risk than it mitigates. 

The Multi-Cloud Reality Check 

• Operational complexity - Managing multiple platforms requires expertise in each provider's unique tools, services, and best practices 

• Fragmented security - Each platform requires different security configurations, dramatically increasing the attack surface and misconfiguration risks 

• Hidden costs - Data egress fees, duplicated services, lack of volume discounts, and specialized staff can make multi-cloud significantly more expensive 

• Integration challenges - Getting workloads to seamlessly failover between different cloud platforms requires sophisticated engineering 

• Delayed innovation - Teams spend time managing infrastructure complexity instead of building business value 

The reality? Multi-cloud done poorly can actually reduce reliability by introducing complexity, management overhead, and additional points of failure. Unless you have the resources, expertise, and clear business drivers for multi-cloud, it often creates more problems than it solves. 

The Smarter Alternative: Well-Architected + Strategic Hybrid Cloud 

Instead of adding multi-cloud complexity, there's a more practical path: Build resilience into your cloud architecture from the start, and use hybrid cloud strategically where it makes sense. 

Step 1: Architect for Resilience Within Your Primary Cloud 

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all provide comprehensive frameworks and tools for building resilient applications. The challenge is that most organizations don't take advantage of them. 

NexusTek's AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) identifies: 

• High-risk misconfigurations that could cascade into outages 
• Single points of failure in your architecture 
• Cost inefficiencies draining 20-30% of your cloud budget 
• Security gaps exposing you to breaches 
• Performance bottlenecks degrading user experience 
• Sustainability improvements to reduce your environmental impact 

The framework evaluates your workloads across six critical pillars: Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, and Sustainability. 

The best part? It's completely free for qualified AWS customers, completed in about one week, and if you remediate at least 40% of identified high-risk issues, AWS will provide up to $5,000 in credits to help fund the improvements. 

Think of it as a comprehensive health checkup for your cloud infrastructure—one that identifies vulnerabilities before they become headlines. 

What Proper AWS Architecture Should Include: 

• Multi-AZ deployments - Availability Zones are physically separate locations within a region
• Multi-region for critical workloads - Geographic redundancy for disaster recovery
• Auto-scaling and self-healing - Automatically replace failed components
• Regular backup testing - Backups are worthless if you can't restore from them
• Chaos engineering practices - Proactively test failure scenarios
• Proper monitoring and alerting - Detect issues before users do 

Most outages don't require multi-cloud to prevent—they require proper architecture within your primary cloud. 

Step 2: Add Hybrid Cloud as Your Strategic Foundation 

Here's where the real resilience advantage comes in: Instead of trying to orchestrate workloads across multiple public clouds (complexity nightmare), you can build a strategic hybrid cloud architecture with private cloud as your stable, predictable foundation for specific workloads. 

NexusTek Private Cloud provides: 

• 99.99% uptime SLA - Enterprise-grade reliability with predictable performance 
• Tier 4 or 5 rated data centers - Infrastructure built for mission-critical workloads 
• Fixed, transparent pricing - No surprise consumption bills or egress fees 
• Seamless hybrid integration - Connect to AWS, Azure, or GCP when it makes sense 
• AI-ready GPU infrastructure - Run AI workloads privately without exposing sensitive data 
• Compliance-first design - Built for regulated industries with stringent requirements 
• 100% migration success rate - Proven migration methodology backed by 25+ years experience 

The Hybrid Cloud Advantage 

With a properly architected AWS environment PLUS strategic private cloud for specific workloads, you get: 

• Public cloud agility for workloads that need elastic scaling
• Private cloud stability for predictable, mission-critical applications
• Cost predictability where it matters most
• True redundancy without multi-cloud management chaos
• Expert management from 350+ certified cloud engineers
• Regulatory compliance for sensitive workloads 

This isn't about abandoning public cloud—it's about using the right infrastructure for each workload and building in resilience where you need it most. 

What Today’s Outage Should Teach Every CIO 

The question isn't whether service disruptions will happen (they will, to all providers), but whether your business architecture can withstand them when they do. 

Three Actions You Can Take This Week: 

1. Schedule a Well-Architected Framework Review
   Discover if your AWS infrastructure is built to survive the next disruption. Free assessment, one-week turnaround, and up to $5,000 in AWS credits for qualified remediation.
2. Assess Your Hybrid Cloud Strategy
   Evaluate which workloads truly need public cloud elasticity and which would benefit from the stability and predictability of private cloud infrastructure.
3. Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan
   "We're in the cloud" is not a disaster recovery strategy. When was the last time you actually tested your backups, failover procedures, and recovery time objectives?

The Bottom Line 

Today's AWS outage affected major platforms like Snapchat, Roblox, Ring, Coinbase, and Disney. Tomorrow it could be Azure. Next month, Google Cloud. The provider doesn't matter—what matters is whether your architecture can handle it. 

Cloud outages across all providers are up 18% year-over-year. But 68% of failures are caused by preventable human error and architectural gaps, not provider-level issues. 

The solution isn't to add multi-cloud complexity that most organizations can't effectively manage. It's to: 

1. Architect your primary cloud properly using proven frameworks 

1. Leverage hybrid cloud strategically where stability and predictability matter most 

1. Build real resilience with proper multi-region, multi-AZ designs, tested failovers, and automated recovery 

Don't wait for your own outage to become a wake-up call. 

Ready to Build a More Resilient Cloud Strategy? 

Free AWS Well-Architected Framework Review - Identify critical risks and unlock up to $5,000 in AWS credits 
Schedule Your Review → 

NexusTek Private Cloud - 99.99% uptime SLA with seamless hybrid integration to AWS, Azure, and GCP 
Explore Private Cloud → 

Being prepared means understanding the status that matters for your organization.

Contact us to receive personalized events about your specific AWS accounts and resources, and our team of experts will enable your reporting via the aws.health source in EventBridge or the Health API.