On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage in its US-East-1 region, disrupting over 1,000 companies worldwide—including banks, airlines, media platforms, and critical infrastructure services like Coinbase, Reddit, and Disney+. For Portland SMBs relying on cloud-hosted applications, this event was a wake-up call: cloud convenience must be matched with cloud resilience.
The outage stemmed from a DNS resolution failure in AWS’s DynamoDB service, which cascaded across EC2, IAM, and other core services. Even businesses not hosted in US-East-1 were affected due to shared authentication and configuration dependencies
While AWS resolved the issue within hours, the ripple effects—failed payments, broken apps, and delayed logistics—highlighted how fragile the digital ecosystem can be when concentrated in a few hyperscale providers.
Lessons for Portland SMBs to learn from this error:
Many businesses still rely on a single cloud region or provider. As a Portland MSP, Polar Systems recommends:
- Multi-region failover within your chosen cloud environment
- Multi-cloud strategies using Azure , AWS, and/or GCP
- Warm standby systems for critical workloads
Redundancy is no longer optional
The outage showed that even non-malicious technical faults can become cyber incidents. Businesses should:
- Define alternative communication channels (SMS, radio, backup apps)
- Maintain offline access to key data
- Regularly test DR playbooks with real-world scenarios
While providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer service-level agreements (SLAs) that include financial credits for service disruptions, these credits typically amount to a small percentage of the monthly bill—often just 10% to 25% depending on the severity and duration of the outage. However, the real-world impact of downtime can be far more costly. SMBs should review:
- Incident notification clauses
- Exit strategies
- Uptime guarantees and SLA enforcement
Strategic Takeaway:
The AWS outage wasn’t just a technical hiccup—it was a wake-up call for every organization that depends on cloud infrastructure. While cloud platforms offer scalability and convenience, they also introduce single points of failure that can ripple across entire operations. For regulated industries in Oregon—such as finance, healthcare, and energy—this event underscored a critical truth: cloud reliance without resilience is a risk.
When services go down, it’s not just productivity that suffers. Businesses face potential compliance violations, data access disruptions, and customer trust erosion. In sectors governed by HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or NERC CIP, even brief outages can trigger audit flags, breach reporting requirements, or contractual penalties. This is why operational continuity must be built into the cloud strategy—not bolted on after the fact.
Some other topics that you can review would be the following: