When AWS goes down: what it teaches us about true uptime

Updated: 16 dec 2025

On the morning of 20 October 2025, millions of users around the world woke up to something unusual. Alexa couldn’t answer questions, Fortnite wouldn’t load, and even major business tools like Airtable and Canva were down. The culprit: a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that rippled across the internet.

From e-commerce stores and delivery apps to financial systems and media platforms, businesses of every size felt the impact. Longer than an hour, many couldn’t access their data, complete transactions, or serve customers, all because one cloud region failed.

In this article, we describe the hidden cost of dependence on one infrastructure, and how to truly guarantee uptime for your critical applications.

The hidden cost of dependence

AWS powers much of today’s digital infrastructure. But this outage shows just how fragile centralized cloud dependence can be. When a single provider or even a single region goes down, thousands of businesses grind to a halt.

For e-commerce companies, every minute offline equals lost sales, frustrated customers, and damaged trust. During a peak period such as a product launch or seasonal promotion, the cost of downtime can skyrocket.

The lesson? Shit happens, and even the biggest clouds have outages. But not with Hosted Power.

We opt for an open cloud approach, meaning that we have multiple providers available to move your solution around if sh*t goes south.

How to guarantee uptime for your critical applications

True uptime is not something a single cloud provider can promise. It is the result of architectural choices, operational discipline, and clear ownership of risk. Below are some rules to live by when you want to guarantee uptime for your critical applications.

1. Design for cloud independence

Critical applications should not be tightly coupled to one hyperscaler or even one region. A cloud-agnostic architecture allows workloads to be deployed, migrated, or scaled across different public or private clouds without major rewrites.

This reduces systemic risk: if one provider or region experiences an outage, your application can continue running elsewhere.

2. Avoid vendor lock-in at every layer

Uptime is not only about infrastructure availability, but also about control. Retaining ownership over your deployment configuration, data, and automation pipelines makes it possible to react quickly when something goes wrong.

When switching environments or scaling capacity is a controlled process rather than a complex migration, downtime becomes an exception instead of a given.

3. Build in proactive monitoring and automated recovery

High availability requires more than alerts after something breaks. Mature setups continuously monitor critical metrics across infrastructure, application, and network layers.

By combining early detection with automated remediation such as failover, scaling, or traffic rerouting, many incidents can be resolved before end users ever notice.

4. Engineer for peak load, not for average traffic

Many outages cause the most damage during peak moments such as promotions, launches, or seasonal traffic spikes. Architectures that are tuned only for normal conditions tend to fail exactly when uptime matters most.

Performance-critical applications benefit from layered optimizations such as caching, load balancing, and database tuning, ensuring they remain responsive even under extreme load.

Outages happen. Downtime doesn’t have to.

The AWS outage is a reminder that no single cloud is infallible. But your business can be.

With a cloud agnostic approach, proactive operational support, and the freedom to adapt without disruption, organizations can stay online even when major infrastructure fails. This combination of platform design and expert support makes the difference in situations like this.

When using our TurboStack platform, your customers won’t notice the next cloud outage because your site will stay up.

Sounds great? Our experts are happy to have a talk about true uptime.

Talk to us about uptime