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by Shaunak Godbole

Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage late Sunday night into early Monday, affecting well-known websites and apps worldwide and temporarily shutting down a sizable portion of the internet. AWS's US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, a crucial data center for Amazon, was the source of the disturbance, which began at roughly three in the morning Eastern Time.

The recent AWS outage was more than a minor blip; it was a massive multi-million-dollar stress test on global digital resilience, directly exposing systemic vulnerabilities in operational continuity.

Scope and Impact

Millions of consumers on several continents and thousands of companies were impacted by the outage. Gaming platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, and PlayStation Network were the next to be disrupted, after apps like Snapchat, Venmo, and Zoom. Connectivity problems also affected streaming and e-commerce services like Amazon itself, the McDonald's app, and Prime Video.

Potential interruptions to healthcare organizations included electronic health record access, telehealth services, and patient intake.

Customers of Robinhood, Coinbase, and a number of other financial organizations were unable to complete transactions or access their accounts, making financial services particularly hard hit.

Online banking and government portals in the U.K. and other locations slowed down or went unavailable, according to reports from Europe, indicating spillover effects.

Cause and Resolution

Amazon attributed the widespread disruption to a Domain Name System (DNS) malfunction within its U.S. East Coast operations. The DNS malfunction within the crucial US-EAST-1 region, which resolves web addresses into IP addresses, highlights the danger of control plane and single-region DNS dependency, a key weakness in many initial cloud architectures.

According to Amazon, engineers implemented many adjustments and progressively restored service throughout the morning of 10/20/2025, achieving complete system stability by around 7 a.m. Eastern.

While initial social media speculation pointed to a hack, AWS confirmed the outage was a technical DNS malfunction, not a security breach, reinforcing the need for enhanced technical protection.

Industry Reaction and Implications

The outage reignited debate about the world’s dependence on a handful of cloud providers that power much of the digital economy. Experts noted that such incidents expose systemic vulnerabilities in global infrastructure and highlight the need for better redundancy across cloud regions.

This incident mandates a proactive reassessment of failover and disaster recovery strategies, moving beyond simple backup to true cross-region, active-passive, or active-active resilience.

Despite full-service restoration by Monday morning (10/20/25), the incident serves as an important reminder that even the most robust cloud platforms are not immune to failure and when AWS goes down, much of the internet goes with it.

Call to Action

This event is about more than AWS; it’s a mirror for every organization dependent on digital continuity. Whether in healthcare, finance, retail, or government, reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure creates shared vulnerability. Business continuity plans must evolve from checklists to living, tested systems that account for third-party dependencies. Resilience is about more than about having backups; it’s about anticipating inevitable failure and engineering systems to adapt gracefully.

For years, we’ve treated cloud reliability as a comfort blanket. But the disruption underscored that resilience isn’t a byproduct of uptime, it’s a deliberate design choice.

For healthcare organizations, robust resilience (RTO/RPO) is a critical component of compliance with the HIPAA Security Rule for maintaining availability.

The AWS outage serves as a call to technology leaders to ensure:

• Multi-region, multi-cloud architectures become standard operating models, mitigating the risk of a single control plane failure and single-provider vendor lock-in.
• Critical workloads are decoupled from singular control planes or regions.
• Incident response plans extend beyond infrastructure to include communication and continuity with customers and partners, specifically detailing patient data access protocols, and time-to-notification metrics.

Conclusion

Meditology Services' Cloud Security Team is uniquely equipped to fortify your organization's security and resilience through a Cloud Resilience Program that combines multi-region architecture, DNS redundancy, and validated disaster recovery and business continuity plans all aligned with CIS Benchmarks, HIPAA, HITRUST, and SOC 2 frameworks.

Clients can achieve measurable RTO/RPO, documented failover runbooks, and tested recovery exercises, reducing outages and improving recovery times. The result: enhanced trust, stronger cyber-resilience, and measurable KPIs with transparent cost controls.

Our proprietary Cloud Security Risk Register and Reporting Framework empowers organizations to proactively manage risks, maintain compliance, and stay ahead of evolving threats. Through continuous security control updates, we help clients unlock the full potential of cloud technologies, securely and confidently.

Ready to strengthen your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy? Partner with Meditology to design and implement resilient, compliant, and future-ready cloud architectures that ensure uninterrupted operations even during major outages. Our approach combines multi-region deployments, automated failover, and tested recovery plans to keep your critical services available and secure.

About the Author

Shaunak Godbole is a seasoned Cloud Security Architect and Team Lead at Meditology Services, LLC, holding a Master’s (MS) degree in Computer Science. With certifications in Microsoft Azure Fundamentals and Solutions Architect Expert, Shaunak brings over six years of specialized experience in cloud security and risk management.

He leads Meditology’s Cloud Security Service Line, playing a pivotal role in its development and strategic direction. As a trusted engagement leader, Shaunak has successfully delivered security and compliance solutions to major healthcare providers across the country.

His technical expertise spans key regulatory frameworks including HIPAA, NIST, and HITRUST, positioning him as a recognized subject matter expert in IT security and compliance. Through his hands-on contributions, Shaunak has helped healthcare organizations strengthen their security posture and achieve regulatory compliance.

With a growing reputation in the healthcare cloud security space, Shaunak continues to advance as a thought leader, driving innovation and excellence in the field.

Resources

• https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/amazon-tech-outage-10-20-25-intl
• https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/amazon-web-services-outage-websites-offline-rcna238594