By krivithreddy By Krivith Reddy – Federal Account Manager, Connection
(Views expressed are my own.)
The Morning the Internet Wobbled
At 3 a.m. Eastern on October 20, 2025, much of the digital world hiccupped. Apps froze, smart devices lost connection, and authentication systems stalled. The culprit: an outage in AWS US-East-1, Amazon’s largest and oldest cloud region, located in Northern Virginia. For several hours, one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure faltered — and reminded everyone that the “cloud” is still, at its core, somebody else’s computer .
According to Reuters, AWS reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple services in Northern Virginia,” later identifying a DNS-related failure that rippled across dependent systems【Reuters 2025】. Affected organizations ranged from Snapchat, Signal, Roblox, Fortnite, Venmo, Coinbase, and Prime Video, to several banks and government portals【The Guardian 2025】【Al Jazeera 2025】. Even Alexa and Ring went dark. For users, it felt like the internet had crashed.
How US-East-1 Became a Single Point of Failure
As explained in a detailed analysis by retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer (Dave’s Garage on YouTube), US-East-1 is “the region of gravity” inside AWS — a place where legacy control-plane logic, historical dependencies, and global service stubs still converge【Dave’s Garage YouTube】.
The outage began with a DNS resolution failure for DynamoDB API endpoints. When clients couldn’t resolve hostnames, their SDKs retried exponentially, creating network congestion. Load balancer control-planes also faltered, amplifying the failure. AWS mitigated the root issue by 2:24 a.m. Pacific, but full normalization took hours as caches repopulated and capacity warmed back up【ThousandEyes 2025】【Datacenter Dynamics 2025】.
This wasn’t a cyberattack; it was the predictable product of complex systems and hidden dependencies. A single fragile link — in this case, DNS — became a denial-of-service loop across thousands of microservices.
Why This Matters for Federal Agencies
1. Mission Continuity Depends on Architectural Independence
Many federal workloads operate under FedRAMP authorization in one AWS region. That often satisfies redundancy within the region, but not across regions. When the control plane or DNS fails region-wide, multi-AZ redundancy becomes meaningless. As Dave Plummer put it, “You rented one region three different ways and called it a day.”【Dave’s Garage YouTube】
2. Procurement Must Acknowledge Outage Risk
Standard SLAs seldom address regional control-plane or DNS dependencies. Federal buyers should push vendors to disclose recovery models, cross-region guarantees, and transparency requirements — not just uptime percentages.
3. Resilience Requires Practice, Not PowerPoint
Plummer’s advice resonates beyond the private sector: “Turn off US-East-1 once a quarter and see what dies.” Chaos-testing in staging or sandbox environments reveals brittle assumptions before they matter.
4. Perception Is Its Own Risk
Even as AWS reported progress, users still experienced downtime. Newsweek noted that while AWS marked the root cause as “mitigated,” many customers continued seeing errors for hours【Newsweek 2025】. For citizen-facing federal systems, this perception gap erodes trust — especially during emergencies or critical service delivery.
5. Centralization = Monoculture
The Guardian observed that regulators in the UK questioned whether AWS should be classified as critical infrastructure for finance【The Guardian 2025】. The same logic applies to U.S. government dependencies. Concentrating too many services in a single provider or region is the digital equivalent of a monocrop — efficient but fragile.
Lessons for Federal Technology Leaders
- Map Dependencies Like Lifelines, Not Libraries. Know which APIs, identity tokens, and data stores have hard regional dependencies.
- Treat Regions as Variables, Not Constants. Build configurations that can switch regions under pressure — no hard-coded endpoints.
- Invest in Multi-Region or Hybrid Architectures. Even limited failover across US-East-1 and US-West-2 can dramatically reduce mission impact.
- Demand Observability and Transparency. Monitoring tools should detect latency anomalies before status dashboards confirm them.
- Bake Resilience Into Contracts. Require cloud vendors to include region-failover clauses and proactive communication timelines.
From Crisis to Capability
At Connection, we partner with federal agencies to translate outages like this into actionable resilience plans:
- Cloud-architecture assessments and dependency mapping
- DNS and failover validation
- SLA and procurement reviews
- Continuity and chaos-engineering workshops
Because resilience isn’t built by accident — it’s practiced. As Plummer concluded, “The resiliency you don’t practice is the resiliency you don’t actually have.”【Dave’s Garage YouTube】
Conclusion
The October 2025 AWS outage wasn’t an anomaly; it was a stress test for a world that depends on invisible interconnections. For federal agencies, the lesson is clear: assume every dependency fails — and make those failures boring.
Those who design for boredom will be the ones whose systems stay online when the next 3 a.m. incident arrives.
Sources
- Dave’s Garage. “AWS Outage: Why US-East-1 Went Down (October 2025).” YouTube, 20 Oct 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFvhpt8FN18
- Reuters. “Amazon’s Cloud Unit Reports Outage; Several Websites Down.” 20 Oct 2025. reuters.com
- Al Jazeera. “What Caused Amazon’s AWS Outage and Why Did So Many Major Apps Go Offline?” 21 Oct 2025. aljazeera.com
- The Guardian. “Amazon Web Services Outage Hits Dozens of Websites and Apps.” 20 Oct 2025. theguardian.com
- ThousandEyes. “AWS Outage Analysis – October 20 2025.” thousandeyes.com
- Datacenter Dynamics. “Major AWS Outage Brings Down Much of the Web.” datacenterdynamics.com
- Newsweek. “AWS Outage Today: How Long Will It Last and Cause of Outage Explained.” newsweek.com