2025 AWS Outage: When Redundancy Isn’t Enough
Today’s outage shows how even the most massively redundant cloud systems can fall victim to a single point of failure. At roughly 3:11 a.m. ET, Amazon Web Services (AWS) first reported the event, noting it was seeing “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
Despite the company’s vast scale and extensive redundancy, the ripple effects were felt across the internet. From games like Fortnite and apps like Snapchat to major banks and government services, there are over 1000 companies affected by the AWS outage.
The 2025 AWS outage reveals once again how dependent global infrastructure has become on Amazon’s cloud backbone.
A timeline of the impact
- At around 3:11 a.m. ET, AWS began experiencing major outages. And since AWS serves as the backbone of much of the internet, hundreds of websites and services were taken down with it.
- Almost immediately, outage reports spiked for apps like Snapchat, Venmo, and Ring, as well as Amazon services like Alexa, and popular games such as Fortnite and Pokémon GO.
- By 4:26 a.m. ET, AWS confirmed it was a serious issue tied to its DynamoDB endpoint—essentially the “digital phonebook” of the internet.
- At 5:01 a.m. ET, the root cause was identified and a fix was initiated.
- By 5:22 a.m. ET, the fix was deployed and services gradually began returning to normal. Then, Reddit went down, and AWS reported a backlog of issues still being worked through.
- At 7:48 a.m. ET, Amazon announced it had found a fix but continued addressing lingering issues—Ring and Chime remained affected.
- By 8:48 a.m. ET, more fixes were being rolled out, yet in a game of digital whack-a-mole, Wordle and Snapchat users once again saw outages as AWS reports began to climb back up.
Why didn’t AWS redundancy prevent the 2025 outage?
AWS’s architecture appears bullet-proof: multiple availability zones, fail-over systems, and geographically distributed data centers. Yet this outage underscores how redundancy alone isn’t enough when critical components or dependencies are shared across those supposedly independent systems.
- Shared control planes & backend services: Centralized management layers like IAM, DynamoDB, and routing APIs become bottlenecks when they fail.
- Layered dependencies: Downstream services all rely on the same upstream endpoints.
- Control plane vs. data plane failures: Even if compute and storage are still online, if the control systems that manage them fail, your operations can grind to a halt.
What lessons should architects and IT leaders take from the 2025 AWS outage?
- Assume infrastructure will fail, and design accordingly.
- Diverify infrastructure to avoid concentration risk. Multi-region or multi-cloud designs reduce blast radius.
- Map hidden dependencies and shared components. Understand what “shared” actually means in your architecture.
- Test isolation and recovery paths regularly. Verify that your fallback actually runs on independent systems.
- Have communication and recovery playbooks ready and up-to-date, especially for mission-critical workloads.
Why is isolation the new redundancy?
The AWS outage highlights a fundamental shift in how we think about resilience. Traditional redundancy—mirroring servers, replicating databases, or deploying across availability zones—can protect you from localized hardware failures. But it doesn’t protect you from systemic dependencies.
When an entire control plane, identity service, or storage API fails, no amount of mirroring within that same ecosystem keeps you online.
True continuity requires isolation. That means running environments that remain operational even when shared control planes or upstream providers go dark.
How can businesses prevent downtime after events like the 2025 AWS Outage?
The 2025 AWS outage revealed a major flaw in cloud-native design. Even highly redundant systems can fail when shared control planes or public interconnects go down. For many businesses, redundancy alone wasn’t enough. Their workloads were still tied to centralized systems that created single points of failure, leading to widespread downtime.
At HorizonIQ, we eliminate this dependency with isolation-first architecture.
- Private Cloud and Bare Metal platforms provide single-tenant environments that are self-contained, predictable, and directly controllable. This keeps workloads safe from cascading regional failures.
- HorizonIQ Connect delivers software-defined interconnects up to 100 Gbps, bridging private and public environments through secure, private links that bypass the public internet.
- Dedicated Disaster Recovery Environments make sure critical workloads can instantly fail over to isolated infrastructure if primary systems are disrupted.
If this architecture had been in place for many of the applications hit by the AWS outage, they could have stayed online by failing over to an isolated private environment or a bare metal standby node.
HorizonIQ’s approach ensures redundancy protects hardware, isolation protects uptime, and hybrid connectivity keeps businesses agile, without the risks of shared downtime.
