AWS disruption awakens the Giant

On October 20 something happened that many CIOs had feared but few had truly planned for: large blocks of Amazon Web Services went down. Within minutes, access to millions of applications vanished. E-commerce sites, payment gateways, media platforms, IoT systems — all offline. It wasn’t a brief hiccup, but a six-hour outage that revealed just how entangled our societies have become with a handful of cloud regions.

Amazon described it as “a misconfiguration in the control plane,” but the real issue runs deeper: have we built our digital infrastructure on dangerously narrow foundations?

Many organizations that proudly spoke of multicloud strategies discovered the hard truth — their operations were still chained to AWS, often indirectly through APIs, SaaS dependencies, or shared authentication systems. The incident reignited conversations around cloud neutrality and the urgent need for true portability and resilience across providers.

In parallel, edge computing has gained new momentum as companies explore ways to move computation closer to users — from data centers to devices themselves.
The 2025 AWS outage will likely be remembered as the moment the myth of “always-on” cloud computing cracked, exposing both the fragility and centralization of the internet’s backbone.