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.
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.
The widespread disruption was triggered by a core dependency issue that demonstrated the dangerous coupling of core AWS control plane services:
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 financial fallout was staggering: global businesses collectively lost an estimated $75 million per hour during the primary service interruption.
|
Affected Entity |
Estimated Loss Per Hour |
|
Core Amazon Systems (Retail, Prime Video, Alexa) |
$72,831,050 |
|
Snapchat |
$611,986 |
|
Zoom |
$532,580 |
|
Roblox |
$411,187 |
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.
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:
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 primary strategic mandate must shift from basic high availability (Multi-AZ) to sophisticated, geographically isolated resilience: Multi-Region and Multi-Vendor failover.
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:
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.