And They All Fall Down—Mitigate Your Risk From Cloud-Dependent Downtime
On Oct. 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage that affected an estimated 1,000 or more different apps and services, including Snapchat, McDonalds, Office 365, Outlook, Alexa, the Fly Delta app, Strava, Toast, and many others. The outage caused extended recovery delays due to backlogs, created ripple effects from heavy reliance on a single cloud region (U.S. East-1), and led to slow remediation because of authentication issues. Even after services were restored, some apps and systems experienced intermittent slowdowns globally.
AWS Outage Disruption; Root Cause—DNS Resolution Failure
AWS reported the root cause of failure as the U.S. East-1 region’s DynamoDB API endpoint, upon which many AWS services and, by extension, many third-party systems and apps depend. The AWS outage occurred when DNS requests to the DynamoDB API endpoint could not be properly routed or connected, causing a cascade of disruptions across other cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, banking, retail, airline, government services, social media, and more.
AWS outages don’t occur regularly, but when they do there is a lot at stake, because AWS is a key piece of infrastructure on which many businesses and some federal organizations rely.
The exact cost per organization related to the AWS outage varied widely, but industry estimates for major outages have placed average enterprise losses at approximately $540,000 per hour, with some organizations reportedly losing over $5 million per hour. For major websites, one analysis estimated specific losses, such as Amazon’s own, at around $72 million per hour. The incident reaffirmed how dependent modern businesses are on single-region cloud architectures.
Are you looking for a way to better ensure business or operational continuity instead of relying on a possible single point of failure in your region?
Visit the Atomic OSSEC page
Reminder: The Cloud Is Just Someone Else’s Computer
When reliability is critical, you need options when your cloud provider has an outage. AWS outages aren’t anything new, and they aren’t unique to Amazon or any provider; they are simply a fact of life. Similar outages will happen again—will you be ready?
Unlike other security vendors, Atomicorp products do not require access to the Internet and are not dependent on the cloud. You own your security and control your data with Atomicorp, which is vital if reliability is a concern and security a must.
Whether your infrastructure is fully on-premise, entirely in the cloud, a hybrid, or completely air gapped, we have you covered. This flexibility ensures our security solution integrates seamlessly with your specific operational and reliability needs, providing consistent protection no matter where your endpoints, servers, assets and devices reside, and even when a major cloud provider goes down.
Atomicorp empower customers to:
- Deploy comprehensive server, workload, device and endpoint protection to secure assets everywhere. This includes real-time intrusion protection, web and web API protection, antivirus and anti‑malware defenses, device hardening, authentication and advanced access controls, plus on‑device firewalls, file integrity monitoring (FIM), fileless malware detection, and other integrated EDR capabilities.
- Continuously and automatically scan computers for vulnerabilities to detect and plug exploitation pathways within the closed system.
- Scan assets automatically for compliance with CIS, PCi DSS, NIST, and more.
- Monitor and back up files and system configurations redundantly and in isolation. This enables an organization to roll back to a previous version and more rapidly resume operations should service be interrupted or malware or intruder strike.
- Deploy modern, advanced security and compliance rules.
- Affordably ensure redundant and outage-resistant cybersecurity is available to continue operations when cloud-dependent security (i.e., someone else’s computers) isn’t. Atomic OSSEC is available for less than $5 per device per month, and the product can scale as you do. (We offer an agentless deployment option as well.) Contact Us about volume discounts.
Atomicorp Reduces Cloud Risks
The Oct. 20th AWS cloud outage disrupted 1,000 or more cloud-dependent apps and services, costing many impacted organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in lost business and expenses. The outage supports a case for outage-resistant options to ensure operational resilience and avoid costly operational downtime. Atomicorp’s Atomic OSSEC functions independently of these cascading cloud service disruptions to deliver full-spectrum, on-device protection with IPS, vulnerability management, EDR, compliance scanning, AV, firewall, FIM, and more. This robust solution ensures your security is absolute for the next time the cloud bursts.
Contact Us with questions.