Recent AWS & Azure Outages and Their Impact on Major Companies

If your business relies on the cloud, you felt the ripple effects. In recent weeks, major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure experienced significant outages that brought thousands of companies, both giants and SMBs, to a screeching halt.

The takeaway for business leaders is clear: even the most powerful, “always-on” cloud platforms are not infallible. The question isn’t if an outage will occur, but how prepared your business is to handle it.

Let’s break down what happened, why it matters to you, and how a strategic approach to technology can turn a potential disaster into a minor inconvenience.

The Root Cause of the Outages

While we imagine complex cyberattacks, the reality is often more mundane. The AWS outage on October 20 stemmed from a DNS configuration error in the US-EAST-1 region, which cascaded into widespread communication failures across services. Azure’s disruption on October 29 was triggered by a faulty configuration change in Azure Front Door, a core traffic-routing service, which bypassed safety checks and overwhelmed the system for over eight hours.

In simple terms, it’s like a single wrong turn in a massive, interconnected highway system, causing a traffic jam that brings an entire city to a standstill. A small mistake at the provider level can cascade, demonstrating that no single provider, regardless of its size, is immune to failure.

This underscores a critical lesson: putting all your digital eggs in one basket is a significant business risk.

Real-World Impact: When Giants Stumble

You don’t need to be a tech expert to understand the impact. These weren’t isolated IT issues; they were business disruptions with tangible consequences.

• The AWS Outage: During the AWS outage on October 20, 2025, Canva, the go-to design tool for marketing teams, went completely offline, halting collaborative projects and content creation for millions of users worldwide. Eventbrite, vital for event planners and SMBs managing registrations, faced widespread disruptions from the same incident, freezing ticket sales and attendee communications at a critical time. HubSpot, the CRM powerhouse for sales and marketing, experienced partial downtime tied to AWS, delaying lead tracking and email campaigns for dependent businesses.
• The Azure Outage: The Azure outage struck just nine days later, on October 29, 2025, amplifying the chaos. Airlines like Alaska Air saw booking systems fail, stranding travelers and crews. Starbucks reported app and payment glitches, frustrating customers during rush hours. Gaming services like Xbox Live and Minecraft went offline, while Microsoft 365 tools, including Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive, left remote teams unable to collaborate.

For these companies, the immediate cost was lost productivity and revenue. For the SMBs relying on them, the outage meant missed opportunities, delayed projects, and frustrated customers. The dependency is real, and the risk is shared.

How to Build Cloud Resilience

At Yeo & Yeo Technology, we believe your technology should empower your business, not expose it. We help our clients move from a reactive to a proactive stance. The goal isn’t to avoid using AWS or Azure—they are incredible tools—but to use them intelligently to build a resilient operation.

Our approach focuses on practical, foundational strategies:

1. Cloud Preparedness & Strategy: We work with leadership to assess your true dependency on cloud services. What systems are mission-critical? What is the financial impact of an hour or a day of downtime? We help you develop a Cloud Business Continuity Plan so everyone knows what to do when the lights go out.
2. Architecting for Redundancy: We help design your key systems with failover strategies. This could mean spreading non-sensitive data across multiple geographic regions or even leveraging a secondary cloud provider for your most critical applications. If one path fails, traffic is automatically rerouted with minimal disruption.
3. Proactive Monitoring & Support: Our team doesn’t wait for you to report a problem. We employ advanced monitoring tools that continuously monitor your core systems, often identifying and mitigating issues before they impact your end-users.

This isn’t about selling fear; it’s about building confidence. By taking these steps, you’re not just buying an IT service, you’re investing in the operational stability of your business.

Your Next Step: A Conversation About Confidence

An outage at a major cloud provider is a stark reminder that business continuity is not a given. It’s the result of deliberate planning and strategic partnership.

You don’t have to navigate this complexity alone.

Let’s start with a conversation. Contact our technology team today for a no-obligation Business Continuity Assessment. We’ll help you identify your key vulnerabilities and outline a clear, practical path to a more resilient and confident future.