Should We Expect More Outages?
On October 20th at around 12:11am PDT, Amazon subsidiary, AWS sparked controversy during their global outage, leaving the question, should we expect more outages?
What we can learn about the recent AWS outage and what to expect going forward.
Many significant events have shaped 2025, yet web outages continue to steal the spotlight. From individuals to global corporations, no one has been immune to the sudden glitches and widespread disruptions that have interrupted daily life and business operations.
As AI becomes more integrated into our routines and dependence on cloud-based systems grows, one question looms large: Are we moving toward a more reliable internet or are outages here to stay?
Software glitches are more common than people realize. They occur daily due to compatibility issues on one's device or even a lack of updates. But when major governments, companies, and global entities use such software and it glitches, you can expect these organizations to be affected on a large scale. Losing millions of dollars in a single day due to just minutes of disruptions. Online outages have been nothing new. In 2024, CrowdStrike faced backlash over a software glitch that disrupted the world, marking one of the most significant IT outages. This issue was directly tied to a software update called "Falcon" issued by CrowdStrike; however, the ongoing update did not interact well with Windows, causing a system crash and ultimately an outage.
AWS has been a significant factor in navigating the online ecosystem due to its cloud services. Many top companies have adopted cloud computing to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Cloud computing is a form of storage that involves processing and managing data from external networks or remote servers hosted on the internet, rather than using one's own local server or personal computer.
The AWS outage earlier this week was linked to a Domain Name System issue. Also known as DNS, it is essentially a system for converting domain names into IP addresses, which are numbers. If this process is not conducted correctly, it can eventually lead to a break in the connection. Since DNS is a feature all domains have, and major Fortune 500 companies use AWS services, we have seen a widespread effect. Since the outage earlier this week, many companies that use these services have been restored; however, we estimate the losses from such an outage could be in the millions.
Fortune 500 companies utilize companies such as CrowdStrike and AWS to run operations. With cloud services becoming more in demand, should we expect such outages more often? It truly depends. While software glitches are inevitable (hence the need for a strong technical team, such as software and cloud engineers), issues arise when such services become centralized. While current outages are typically resolved quickly, it remains unclear whether ongoing developments in quantum computing and artificial intelligence pose future risks to these processes. Posing the question of how reliant we have become and how much more integrated it will become in our everyday lives.
