On October 20, 2025, AWS experienced a widespread outage that disrupted thousands of applications and websites globally, impacting critical business operations everywhere. (Source) For organizations in Ohio—particularly those in manufacturing, healthcare, legal, accounting, and real estate or country club operations—this event is far more than a routine technology hiccup. It’s a serious alert: when foundational cloud infrastructure fails, the consequences extend beyond temporary inconvenience. Businesses can face regulatory violations, unplanned operational downtime, and lasting damage to client trust. In regulated sectors, that could mean missed compliance requirements; in sectors relying on uninterrupted workflows, the financial impact and reputation risks compound quickly. This incident underscores just how interconnected—and vulnerable—business continuity has become when cloud service providers experience major failures.
This article will walk through:
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What happened and how services were impacted
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Why this matters to your business — even if you’re not directly using AWS
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What you should check immediately and what strategic actions to take
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How Securafy helps Ohio-based enterprises build resilience beyond cloud dependency
What Happened: The Anatomy of the Outage
Root cause & scope
AWS reported severe “increased error rates and latencies” in multiple services within the US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia) — particularly affecting services such as DynamoDB, EC2, IAM, Secrets Manager and others. (Source) According to AWS status updates, the first signs of trouble surfaced around 03:11 a.m. ET on October 20. (Source) By 05:27 a.m. ET, AWS saw significant signs of recovery; by around 06:35 a.m., many service operations were “succeeding normally,” though residual latency and backlogs remained. (Source)
Impacted services & ripple effect
The outage’s impact extended far beyond companies with direct AWS accounts. Because so many of today’s software applications and IT platforms are interconnected—using AWS infrastructure “in the stack”—the disruption rippled throughout the digital supply chain:
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Widely used platforms such as Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, and Signal experienced significant downtime or severe performance issues, impacting millions of end-users and the businesses that rely on these channels for communications or transactions. (Source)
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Critical sectors including financial services, telecommunications, and even public sector organizations like the UK’s HMRC reported service interruptions—affecting the ability of both individual users and enterprises to access essential online resources. (Source)
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For businesses relying on AWS to deliver their SaaS platforms, support internal tools, or provide vendor integrations, the outage led to either a total halt in operations or significant performance degradation, stalling business processes across industries.
This widespread disruption underscores how a single cloud provider outage can trigger cascading operational impacts, not just for those with AWS contracts, but also for organizations with indirect dependencies buried within their vendor or software ecosystems.
Why the region matters
Historically, US-EAST-1 is the largest AWS region and the preferred “primary region” for many businesses and architectures. If your organization uses global fail-over patterns, or maybe a SaaS vendor uses US-EAST-1 as its primary endpoint — your exposure increases. (Source)
Why Ohio Businesses Should Care
1. Operational dependency is not always visible
You may assume that not using AWS directly means you’re unaffected by its outages. However, most modern businesses rely on vendors and SaaS providers that, in turn, may depend on AWS for their core operations, log storage, authentication, or backups. An incident affecting AWS can cascade through your supply chain, leading to unexpected slowdowns, transaction failures, or access issues—even if your business never signed an AWS contract. Understanding and mapping these indirect dependencies is essential for continuity planning.
2. Uptime, reputation & revenue
Downtime isn’t just an IT headache—it’s a revenue and reputation hit. Manufacturers can lose tens of thousands of dollars for each minute of lost production. In healthcare and legal, inability to access data or apps can result in compliance violations (HIPAA, SOX) and put sensitive client information at risk. This AWS disruption is a clear reminder: relying on the cloud does not guarantee uninterrupted service. Proactive contingency planning becomes critical for protecting your operations, revenue streams, and client relationships.
3. Compliance & audit readiness
Infrastructure outages don’t just frustrate users—they can trigger scrutiny from auditors and regulators. Expect pointed questions: Did you thoroughly vet your vendors? Are your business continuity and resilience strategies robust? Are you holding partners accountable to SLA requirements? For Ohio organizations in manufacturing, healthcare, legal, and accounting, demonstrating robust vendor management and resilience is not optional—regulatory requirements demand documented proof. This event emphasizes the importance of having up-to-date, tested continuity plans and transparent supplier oversight.
4. The cost of assumptions
Believing your vendor or cloud partner “has it all covered” can leave your business exposed to single points of failure. This isn’t just an IT department concern—it’s a leadership imperative tied to risk tolerance, fiduciary responsibility, and keeping the business operational under stress. Executives must ensure risk assessments account for the full IT ecosystem, challenge optimistic assumptions, and demand evidence of resilience planning from both internal and external partners. Building true business continuity requires ongoing diligence beyond initial vendor selection.
What to Do Right Now: A Checklist for Immediate Action
Here are steps you can take today to reduce your exposure and improve resilience.
| Step | Action | Why it Matters |
|---|---|---|
| A | Review your cloud-vendor architecture | Confirm whether your primary systems (ERP, CRM, SaaS apps) rely on AWS or US-EAST-1 region endpoints. |
| B | Conduct a vendor dependency map | Identify which third-party vendors you use that host on AWS (directly or indirectly). |
| C | Validate backup and fail-over processes | If primary region fails, does your system fail-over? Have you tested it? |
| D | Review your SLA & incident-response readiness | Do your contracts clearly define downtime, incident notification, vendor transparency? |
| E | Test your incident-response plan (IRP) | Walk through “cloud-region unavailable” scenario with your team. Practice roles, communications. |
| F | Communicate with your leadership team | Ensure operational stakeholders know this risk isn’t “someone else’s problem” — your business owns it. |
Strategic Resilience: Building Beyond “Cloud Dependence”
Multi-region architecture
If you host or heavily rely on cloud services, consider multi-region or multi-vendor redundancy. For example, replicating critical workloads from US-EAST-1 to US-WEST-2 or another provider can mitigate single-region failures.
Vendor diversity
Avoid “all your eggs in one provider” dependency. A best practice: key services should have alternative providers or backup paths that don’t rely on the same infrastructure stack.
Third-party vendor risk management
Include these questions in vendor evaluations: “Which region do you host in? What is your fail-over strategy? What is your vendor’s fail-over test record?” For regulated industries, keep this documented.
Conduct resilience testing
Annual or bi-annual “disaster drills” that assume the cloud region is unavailable. This helps uncover hidden dependencies (e.g., identity login portals, backup retrieval, SaaS API endpoints).
Leadership and governance
This incident isn’t just a technical event — it touches leadership, risk appetite and business continuity. Operations leaders, board members or managing partners should ask: “If our cloud provider goes offline, how long can our business stay functioning?”
How Securafy Can Help Ohio Businesses
At Securafy, we partner with manufacturers, healthcare providers, law firms, accounting firms and country clubs across Greater Columbus, Cleveland, Akron, Medina and Canton. We understand the pressure of downtime, compliance demands and cost containment.
Here’s what we bring:
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A resilience assessment that maps your cloud dependencies and highlights hidden single points of failure.
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Implementation of multi-vendor/dr-region backup strategies tailored to your industry.
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Third-party vendor review and risk governance support.
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Training and executive-briefing packages to help your leadership team understand "cloud resilience" beyond marketing.
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Ongoing monitoring and business continuity support so you’re not simply “reacting” to cloud failures; you’re staying ahead of them.
The October 20 2025 AWS outage wasn’t just a “cloud vendor problem” — it was a global wake-up for businesses of all sizes. For Ohio companies in manufacturing, healthcare, legal, accounting and real-estate/country-club industries, this means recognizing that cloud dependency is not optional — and resilience is a business priority.
The time to act is now: map your dependencies, test your vendor assumptions, and build a plan that keeps your business running — even when the “cloud” goes dark.
👉 To see how resilient your infrastructure really is, start with a free strategy call to walk through your resilience plan.
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