Six point five million people watched the internet break in real time.
On October 20, 2024, AWS’s US-East-1 region went dark for over 15 hours. Downdetector recorded 6.5 million reports as more than 1,000 sites crashed simultaneously. Coinbase, Snapchat, Zoom, banking platforms, airline systems. All offline.
The culprit? A DNS race condition in DynamoDB’s automated management system.
One empty DNS record. 113 AWS services down.
The Financial Reality You’re Ignoring
Experts estimate the global impact could reach hundreds of billions of dollars. For context, a four-hour S3 outage in 2017 cost S&P 500 companies $150 million. Lloyd’s of London projected that a three-to-six-day outage of a top cloud provider would result in losses between $6.9 billion and $14.7 billion.
This outage lasted 15 hours.
The math gets worse when you understand the concentration. AWS controls 37% of the global cloud market. Add Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and three companies control roughly 90% of infrastructure-as-a-service.
Gartner research warns that many organizations now face “severe disruption in the event of the failure of a single provider.” Cloud concentration risk has lost its “emerging” status. It’s here.
When One Domino Falls
Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN, put it bluntly: “When one domino falls, they all do.”
The cascading effect reveals a deeper fragility. Even companies not hosted in US-East-1 couldn’t access AWS’s control plane. Identity Center, locked to a single region, prevented customers from creating support tickets or changing IAM configurations.
Multi-region strategies failed because the authentication layer itself went down.
Your backup plan assumed the control plane would survive. It didn’t.
The Question You Need to Answer
Major internet outages have surged from a handful in the 1970s to over 80 in the first half of the 2020s. The central role of AWS, Azure, and Google amplifies every failure.
You’ve architected for performance and cost. Have you architected for failure?
The October outage exposed a truth most companies avoid: your business continuity depends on infrastructure you don’t control. When DNS fails, applications stop responding, no matter how well designed.
Regulators are already asking questions. The Bank of England has flagged cloud concentration as a single point of failure. The UK Treasury Select Committee is investigating third-party provider risk.
The real question is whether you’ll wait for the next outage to reassess your strategy, or whether you’ll act now.
Because 6.5 million people just watched what happens when you don’t.