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For 15 hours, thousands of businesses couldn’t access customer records, process payments, or communicate with clients. Imagine your business sitting still for an entire workday.
When Amazon’s cloud sneezes, half the internet catches a cold, and your business might too. Because most SMBs rely on the same cloud giants as enterprise companies, outages ripple downstream instantly.
The October 2025 outage lasted 15 hours and disrupted more than 2,500 companies worldwide.
While AWS quickly recovered, the disruption gave us two bitter pills to swallow:
- Even hyperscale, Fortune-100-backed cloud infrastructures fail.
- I.T. failures don’t discriminate. SMBs face the same exposure as global enterprises if they lack a resilience plan.
If you haven’t caught up with the news just yet, don’t stress, because this article covers all you should know. You’ll learn critical aspects of the AWS outage, what triggered it, the progression of events, and disaster recovery strategies your business can use for I.T. outage preparedness.
Let’s dive in!
What’s my action item? Evaluate whether mission-critical data and workflows remain accessible if your primary cloud provider goes down.
What Happened? The AWS Outage Breakdown
On October 20th, 2025, AWS experienced a 15-hour outage that disrupted more than 2,500 global companies. Engineers traced the issue to failed DNS requests to DynamoDB (Amazon’s cloud database service) in the US-East-1 region. This caused a domino effect that brought down over 140 AWS services worldwide. (In simple terms: AWS lost track of where certain databases lived.)
In simple terms, AWS’s “phone book” stopped working. Systems couldn’t find the data they needed, and entire applications went dark. The result? 15 hours of lost productivity, transactions, and trust.
In the AWS situation, the DNS entry pointing to DynamoDB became corrupted, rendering the database unreachable. As a result, services that directly interact with DynamoDB went down, and so did others that depend on them, resulting in an outage affecting over 140 AWS services.
Why was that a big deal? As the world’s largest cloud provider, AWS serves over one million businesses ranging from large enterprises to startups, many of whom (together with downstream customers) were impacted.
By the time the dust settled, victims had lost not just 15 hours of cloud access but also 15 hours of productivity and transactions.
Lesson to learn: No system is too big to fail…and no business is too small to prepare.
Why Small Businesses Should Pay Attention
The world has become increasingly reliant on a small handful of players. Today, just seven companies account for 30% of the value of the 500 largest companies globally. This concentration means outages affect far more downstream businesses than most leaders realize.
It’s mind-boggling. Ask around, and you will discover that most SMBs depend on the same infrastructure giants: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it can be if you assume “enterprise-grade” equals infallible, which is exactly what many SMB leaders do. Many SMBs learned this the hard way when AWS’s outage stalled their POS systems, phones, and CRM access.
Unlike their counterparts in large corporations, they don’t create redundancy and recovery systems. And this creates real pain when something like the AWS outage hits.
What’s my action item? Map all the services (email, POS, CRM, data storage, etc.) your business uses that depend on third-party clouds. Are you overreliant on Big Tech?
What This Means for SMB Resilience
As the AWS incident demonstrates, outages often start outside your network. But when the dust settles, it’s your internal operations that are hit the hardest.
- You lose access to cloud files and productivity tools.
- Customer communications get interrupted.
- And with no backup workflows, resolving unplanned downtime takes hours.
That’s why I.T. outage preparedness is so vital.
What’s my action item? Establish a “Plan B” workflow, such as offline access, alternative apps, or local copies of critical data.
The Top 5 Insights from the AWS Outage
These are some of the I.T. outage preparedness lessons we can borrow from the massive AWS internet disruption:
#1. No vendor is invincible. Not even Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. As a rule of thumb, diversify vendors and regions where possible to minimize the risk of a single point of failure.
#2. Your data recovery plan should be tested, not theoretical. Run quarterly outage simulations to validate that your backup disaster recovery plan actually works. Don’t wait to find out on doomsday.
#3. Communications matter as much as code. When AWS services were down, Amazon kept customers constantly informed about progress. Following this playbook can similarly help you avoid panic and build trust.
#4. Monitor dependencies you don’t control. Ask your MSP to track upstream service alerts so you know what’s coming in real-time.
#5. Proactive maintenance beats reactive panic, always. If you want to minimize downtime, you really need proactive monitoring, regular patching, redundancy, and business continuity planning.
What’s my action item? Make “outage simulation” part of your annual business continuity planning, just like a fire drill.
Downtime Is Optional, I.T. Outages Are Not
Outages are inevitable…but extended downtime is not. In the past 15 months alone, two of the largest digital disruptions in history (CrowdStrike and AWS) reminded us that resilience isn’t luck; it’s strategy.
SMBs that invested in business continuity recovered faster, maintained customer trust, and even outperformed competitors during downtime.
Disaster Recovery for SMBs: Build I.T. Outage Preparedness With Attentus
Is your business prepared for the next cloud outage?
At Attentus, we help SMBs build business continuity plans that keep systems running even when major providers fail. Our proactive I.T. approach ensures you’re always ready, no matter what happens beyond your control.
Here’s what we’ll do for you:
- Proactively monitor your environment to detect potential service disruptions before they snowball.
- Optimize vendor management to ensure you actually have redundancy and a multi-region backup strategy.
- Build your data backup and recovery for swift restoration even if cloud providers falter.
You can count on us to “own the problem” and follow through on building a solid I.T. outage preparedness plan without finger-pointing.
Book a Business Continuity Planning Review to Avoid Unnecessary Headaches.