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What the AWS Outage Taught CIOs About Preparedness

The October 2025 AWS disruption showed that recovery depends on more than a second Region: SaaS, identity, deployment, and response processes can share the same failure domain.
From TheFinanceBase Team5 min to read
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The October 2025 AWS disruption showed that moving an application to another Region is not enough if the tools, vendors, and people needed to run the business still depend on the failed environment. CIOs need to map those dependencies, define recovery by business function, and test the whole organization—not just the cloud architecture.

What happened in the October 2025 AWS incident

AWS reported increased error rates in US-EAST-1 beginning at 11:49 p.m. PDT on October 19, 2025. The initial problem was DNS resolution for regional DynamoDB service endpoints. AWS said it mitigated that issue by 2:24 a.m. PDT on October 20, reported significant recovery by 12:28 p.m., and said all services had returned to normal by 3:01 p.m. The disruption also affected Amazon.com, subsidiaries, AWS Support, and downstream services.

Forrester analysts Brent Ellis, Alla Valente, Lee Sustar, Devin Dickerson, and Naveen Chhabra described it as the fourth AWS US-East outage in five years. Their analysis emphasized the region’s importance and the way nested platform dependencies can spread disruption across consumer, financial, enterprise, and government services. In a 2025 CIO report, Deluxe CIO Yogs Jayaprakasam also said his company had experienced more than a dozen public-cloud outages across the three major hyperscalers in the prior 12 months, each lasting six hours or more. That is his reported experience, not a universal outage rate.

Why regional failover did not restore Deluxe’s work

Deluxe moved applications from AWS East to AWS West, but its developers still could not work because tools including GitHub and Jira were unavailable. As Jayaprakasam put it, “We thought we’d recovered, but the day-to-day work couldn’t continue because the tools we depend on were down.” The episode exposed a gap between restoring a workload and restoring the business process that relies on it.

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A SaaS brand name alone does not reveal its failure domain. A vendor’s application may depend on a particular cloud provider or Region, and several apparently separate services can therefore fail together. Deluxe responded by adding a SaaS-intake question about where each application actually runs, giving teams information they can use to identify shared dependencies and plan vendor recovery steps.

Match the recovery design to the failure scope

AWS distinguishes high availability from disaster recovery: “High availability is not disaster recovery.” Multi-Availability-Zone design addresses localized data-center failures; a Region-wide risk calls for a multi-Region disaster-recovery strategy. Even multi-Region or multi-cloud designs can retain shared failure points in identity, DNS, networks, data, deployment tools, or SaaS dependencies.

Failure scope What the design must address Key question for the CIO
Availability Zone AWS says multi-Availability-Zone design addresses localized data-center failures. Can the workload continue in another Availability Zone?
Region AWS says Region-wide risks call for a multi-Region DR strategy. Can the business recover if the Region and its regional dependencies are unavailable?
Provider or SaaS service Forrester highlights concentration risk and recommends portability and independent alternatives for critical workloads; Deluxe’s experience shows SaaS tools can also block recovery. Are the alternate provider, vendor, and operating tools independent of the affected failure domain?
Internal control plane or shared dependency The dependency map should include identity, DNS, CI/CD, secrets, certificates, monitoring, and communications—not only the application being failed over. Can teams detect, authorize, and execute recovery without relying on the impaired environment?

AWS describes backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and active-active as disaster-recovery approaches with progressively greater complexity. The appropriate choice depends on the failure scope, acceptable data loss and downtime, cost, and the organization’s ability to operate and test the design; no one pattern is automatically right for every function.

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Build a recovery plan around business outcomes

Map dependencies from the application to the customer

Inventory applications, data stores, identity, DNS, CI/CD, observability, ticketing, communications, and SaaS vendors. For each, record its underlying cloud provider and Region, vendor escalation contact, and recovery path. Then connect those dependencies to business processes and customer outcomes. This is how an inventory becomes useful during an incident: the team can see not only what is down, but which service or task cannot proceed as a result.

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Set recovery objectives by function

Define a recovery time objective (RTO)—the maximum tolerable time to restore a function—and a recovery point objective (RPO)—the maximum tolerable data loss—for customer-facing, revenue, safety, regulatory, and internal-productivity functions. Set targets according to business impact rather than applying one pair of targets to every system. Use those targets to choose among backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, or active-active capacity, and to make the cost and operating burden explicit.

Make sure failover can run independently

Test whether recovery depends on the impaired Region’s DNS, control plane, identity service, deployment pipeline, secrets, certificates, or monitoring. AWS advises using infrastructure as code so infrastructure, configuration, and code can be redeployed in a recovery Region. Forrester recommends portability and independent alternatives for critical workloads. A documented alternate environment is not a usable recovery path if the team cannot authenticate, deploy, observe, or communicate without the failed services.

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Test the organization, not just the application

Deluxe now includes cloud-Region and third-party failures in joint cyber and disaster-recovery exercises instead of treating them as separate tracks. That matters because an outage can look like a cyber incident at first: systems or identity services may be unreachable, while teams lack clear evidence about whether the cause is malicious activity or provider disruption.

Exercises should involve IT operations, security, business continuity, legal and compliance, communications, customer support, and relevant vendors. Include Region and provider outages, loss of SaaS tools, prolonged degraded service, and transaction-integrity scenarios. Test backups, failover, chaos scenarios, and prolonged outages, as Forrester recommends. Record the recovery time and data-loss results observed against the RTO and RPO, along with manual steps, decisions, or approvals that would be difficult under pressure. AWS advises regularly assessing and testing DR strategies; a provider’s stated availability or an untested runbook is not evidence that the business can meet its recovery objectives.

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Coordinate detection, decisions, and communications

Use observability and correlated analytics to identify likely failures before provider communications arrive, and connect those signals to automation or preapproved workarounds when safe. Maintain a shared incident view, vendor escalation tree, customer-communication templates, and explicit decision rights. Forrester identifies observability and infrastructure automation as first-line resilience capabilities; they are most useful when people know who can invoke a workaround and how its effects will be monitored.

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Treat concentration risk as a governance decision

“Multi-cloud” is not proof of independence. Compare whether alternate services rely on separate power, networks, identity, DNS, data paths, and operational teams. Review vendor visibility, escalation commitments, contractual responsibilities, data-residency constraints, regulatory duties, and customer-communication obligations. Prioritize investment in functions whose interruption affects customers, critical infrastructure, or money movement, rather than adding redundancy without a defined business recovery objective.

Jayaprakasam summarized the organizational lesson this way: “Preparedness is the real differentiator. Even the best technology teams can’t compensate for gaps in scenario planning, coordination, and governance.”

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