The $75 Million-Per-Hour Lesson: Why the AWS US-EAST-1 Outage of 2025 Demands a Shift to a Multi-Pronged Resilience StrategyLesson: AWS Outage

My Morning in the Digital Dark: A Personal Glimpse into the Chaos

The outage of October 20, 2025, wasn't just a headline; it was a series of infuriating, everyday disruptions that demonstrated how utterly fragile our reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure has become.

I was traveling back to San Francisco from Austin, TX, after the F1 event on the day of the outage. My alarm went off way too early for a 6:00 a.m. flight, the first sign of trouble had already hit me at 4:15 in the morning when I tried to hail a cab. The Lyft app simply wouldn't work. I quickly switched to Uber and managed to get to the airport, but the anxiety had already set in.

At the United check-in counter, the staff were visibly stressed, struggling with systems that were slow or outright failing, though they eventually processed people. The ripple effects continued: my Starbucks card wouldn't work, forcing me to pay with cash.

Later that day, my daughter mentioned that students at her school couldn't do much because the popular academic platform Canvas was down, effectively giving all the students a free pass for the day.

This wasn't just a technical glitch. It was a mass failure of essential services—from basic transport and coffee payments to airline check-ins and education. It proved that a failure in one AWS region—US-EAST-1—could crash the internet economy and disrupt millions of lives in one fell swoop.

What Happened: The Anatomy of a Regional Collapse

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage was rooted in the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, AWS’s oldest and largest hub. The incident unfolded over many hours, transforming a regional technical fault into a global commercial catastrophe.

Technical Root Cause: A Cascade of Control Plane Failure

The widespread disruption was triggered by a core dependency issue that demonstrated the dangerous coupling of core AWS control plane services:

1. DynamoDB DNS Resolution Issues: The primary trigger was a failure in the DNS system for regional DynamoDB service endpoints, leading to a state of temporary digital "amnesia".
2. Internal Subsystem Impairment: A subsequent failure in an "underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of “Network Load Balancers (NLBs)" further destabilized the AWS control plane—the management layer for scaling and resource deployment.

Engineers had to apply throttling to new EC2 instance launches to stabilize the infrastructure, restricting customers' ability to scale. The process took over 15 hours until full resolution, highlighting the complexity of recovering from a foundational cloud region failure.

The Staggering Cost: $75 Million Per Hour

The financial fallout was staggering: global businesses collectively lost an estimated $75 million per hour during the primary service interruption.

The "blast radius" affected nearly every sector, including finance (Coinbase, Robinhood), communication (Slack, Zoom), core Amazon services, Atlassian among others. This scale prompted criticism that companies whose failure can break the entire internet are "too big" and should be subject to regulatory intervention.

Is This the First Time? Understanding Systemic Risk

The October 2025 incident was not an unprecedented anomaly. Infrastructure failures are cyclical, and this was a repeating pattern of centralized failure within US-EAST-1, which also caused major outages in 2017, 2021, and 2023.

Systemic risk is distributed across all major infrastructure providers:

• GCP: Suffered a half-day outage in its Europe-West3 region in October 2024 due to a power failure.
• Azure: Experienced significant service interruptions, including some attributed to DDoS attacks in June 2023.

Furthermore, non-cloud dependencies pose an equal threat. The July 2024 CrowdStrike incident, where a faulty update crashed approximately 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems, caused estimated global financial damages of at least US$10 billion. 

This illustrates that third-party software dependencies are a massive, often overlooked, systemic risk.

The Path to Resilience: A Multi-Pronged Strategy

The primary strategic mandate must shift from basic high availability (Multi-AZ) to sophisticated, geographically isolated resilience: Multi-Region and Multi-Vendor failover.

Strategic Mandates for AWS Customers:

1. Mandatory Multi-Region Deployment: Multi-AZ protects against a single data center failure, but not against a full region control plane failure like US-EAST-1. All mission-critical applications must transition to validated Multi-Region deployments, requiring regular testing and rotation to guarantee low Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).
2. Embrace Static Stability: Workloads must adopt static stability principles to eliminate reliance on the control plane during a crisis. This means that critical resources—load balancers, DNS records, and storage buckets—must be pre-provisioned in all failover regions. Your recovery process should not require you to call the control plane to provision new resources if it fails.
3. Use Multi-Cloud for Strategic Isolation: The Multi-Vendor strategy offers maximal protection but must be reserved for organizations with mature DevOps, utilizing cloud-agnostic tools and containerization (Kubernetes) to prevent new, self-inflicted systemic risks.
4. On-Premises Backup for Critical Data: For an alternative way to access critical data, organizations should have an on-premises copy of the very critical data, accessible irrespective of the state of the cloud.

Protecting Your Atlassian Data: The Revyz Difference

Atlassian customers, while using cloud-hosted software, are still exposed to these systemic risks. Not only are they vulnerable to underlying cloud failures (like the AWS US-EAST-1 event and the CrowdStrike supply chain risk), but they also face platform-specific disasters. A historical example of this is the April 2022 Atlassian outage, which left many customers completely blocked from accessing their critical data. For the mission-critical information underpinning your project management (Jira) and collaboration (Confluence), data backup and rapid recovery are non-negotiable.

To achieve true resilience, Atlassian customers must adopt a specialized strategy that addresses risk at every level:

1. Validate Third-Party Dependencies: Diversify and validate all critical software dependencies to ensure a single vendor failure cannot bring your operations to a halt.
2. Establish Decoupled Communication: Have tested, alternate channels (phone trees, dedicated social media) for crisis communication, as internal tools like Slack or email may rely on the impaired cloud region.
3. Embrace Specialized DR Solutions with Revyz: When infrastructure fails, your data is the only asset you truly own, and traditional backups often fall short in complex cloud environments. This is where specialized solutions like Revyz for Atlassian Cloud become indispensable.

Revyz provides comprehensive data protection and orchestrated recovery for Jira and Confluence data. Its infrastructure already embraces a multi-region strategy, making it inherently more resilient to large-scale disruptions. Crucially, Revyz offers protection from all kinds of disasters, including human error, malicious deletion, and data import errors. Most powerfully, Revyz ensures data accessibility even when the Atlassian application itself is unavailable (as in the April 2022 outage) or during a major Global Network Disaster (similar to the AWS incident). Revyz allows you to still have access to your data in an end-user usable format, ensuring business continuity and minimizing the catastrophic human and financial cost of downtime.

If you don’t currently use Revyz, contact us today to learn more about how their offerings address the full spectrum of risk facing your critical project data.

The estimated $75 million per hour cost of the 2025 outage is the final, incontrovertible business case for prioritizing investment in resilience architectures. Resilience budgeting is no longer a cost center; it's the insurance policy that pays for itself the moment your Lyft app stops working at 4:00 a.m.