Outage Alert: How the AWS Crash Exposes Hidden Cloud Risks for Aussie SMBs

It’s not a cyberattack, but for a few hours on Monday 20 October 2025 it sure felt like one for businesses across Australia. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud backbone of much of the internet suffered a massive outage that knocked out a large portion of the web. From banking apps and airline systems to team chat tools, this AWS crash rippled across the globe. Aussie small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) woke up to find that even their most trusted cloud apps had gone dark. If your team couldn’t message each other on Slack or your finance folks were locked out of Xero, you experienced first-hand how a cloud outage can bring business to a standstill.

In this post, we’ll break down what happened during the AWS outage and why outages can be just as dangerous to SMBs as cyberattacks. We’ll reveal the hidden risks in your tech stack that this event

has exposed, like single-cloud dependency, SaaS fragility, and weak continuity planning. Most importantly, we’ll lay out smart, actionable steps to bolster your cloud resilience (without the fluff or fearmongering). By the end, you’ll know how to keep your business running when the cloud has a bad day and how Inlight IT’s services (from Backup & Disaster Recovery to Managed IT Support) fit into a robust continuity game plan.

AWS Outage 101: What Happened on the 20th October 2025?

On 20 Oct 2025, AWS experienced a major outage that disrupted services for millions of users worldwide. The issue began in AWS’s Northern Virginia data center (US-EAST-1), one of its largest and oldest, when a routine update to a core database service (Amazon DynamoDB) went horribly wrong. In plain English: a glitch in an AWS system that translates friendly domain names into technical addresses (DNS) caused DynamoDB’s API to become unreachable. This single hiccup cascaded into a cloud meltdown , with DynamoDB down, over 113 AWS services that rely on it started failing in domino effect.

Within minutes, a chunk of the internet blinked out. Popular apps and websites that Australian SMBs rely on every day were among the collateral damage. Internal communication hubs like Slack and Zoom flatlined, project management tools like Atlassian’s Jira went offline, and even Aussie-born platforms like Canva hit snags. Many businesses also found Xero, the beloved accounting SaaS, inaccessible during the chaos. It wasn’t just work apps either, everything from streaming services to smart home gadgets flickered off. For a few hours, it felt like the internet itself was having an outage-induced coma.

The good news? This wasn’t the result of hackers or a cyberattack, just an internal AWS technical snafu (albeit a monumental one). Amazon’s engineers scrambled immediately, working through the early hours to fix the DNS issue and bring systems back online. By roughly mid-morning GMT, AWS announced that services were recovering and things were largely back to normal. The outage lasted only a few hours, but the ripple effects and lessons for businesses will linger much longer.

AWS later confirmed the root cause and apologized, and yes, they’ll undoubtedly publish a dense post-mortem so other techies can learn from the blunder. But for Aussie business owners and IT managers, the real takeaway isn’t the gritty technical detail, it’s recognising our own exposure. When a single cloud provider problem can simultaneously knock out your communication tools, data platforms, and customer-facing apps, it’s a flashing warning sign that business continuity needs to be front and center.

Why Cloud Outages Can Hit SMBs as Hard as Cyberattacks

If you lost access to critical systems during the AWS outage, you experienced a truth many SMBs overlook: an outage can be just as crippling as a cyber hack. We tend to equate “IT disaster” with malicious breaches ransomware, data theft, etc. but as this event shows, mundane technical failures can wreak equal havoc. Your website doesn’t care why it’s down, and your customers won’t either. Whether hackers encrypt your files or Amazon’s cloud has a hiccup, the outcome for your business is the same: operations grind to a halt.

In some ways, an unexpected outage is even trickier than a typical cyber incident. There’s no villain to blame or clear incident response playbook to follow; you’re basically waiting on a vendor to fix their issues while your team twiddles their thumbs. And the clock is ticking,every minute of downtime is money and reputation draining away. How much money? According to a 2024 ITIC report, just one hour of downtime can cost an SMB over $7,000 on the low end, and upwards of $25,000 in lost revenue and productivity on the high end. For context, that’s $120–$420 lost every minute your systems are offline. Now imagine an outage that lasts half a day, or strikes at peak sales hour – the impact can be as devastating as a ransomware attack demanding a hefty payout.

Let’s look at the bigger picture. Businesses have never been more dependent on the cloud than they are today. Over half of SMB workloads (57%) and data (56%) already reside in public clouds, and this reliance is growing fast. In fact, Australian organisations are projected to spend A$26.6 billion on public cloud services in 2025, a nearly 19% jump from the previous year. We’re pouring

more of our IT and operations into cloud platforms like AWS, expecting them to be as reliable as electricity. But when the “lights” go out unexpectedly, the disruption is widespread and costly. Outages might not steal data the way hackers do, but they steal time, money, and trust, which, for an SMB, are just as precious. The AWS crash is a vivid reminder that uptime is not guaranteed, and that business continuity planning isn’t just a “enterprise” concern. If anything, smaller businesses have less cushion to absorb downtime losses, making resilience even more critical.

To be clear, none of this is to knock AWS or cloud services, the cloud still offers tremendous benefits for SMBs in cost and agility. But it’s a reminder that cloud risk management deserves as much attention as cyber risk management. In the same way you invest in cybersecurity and IT security measures to fend off hackers, you must invest in cloud resilience to mitigate vendor downtime and technical failures. As one expert noted during the outage, people initially feared it was a cyberattack because of the scale of disruption, but “in this case, it’s not… Most of the time, it isn’t, it’s usually human error” behind such incidents. In short: tech mishaps happen, so we need to prepare with the same vigor we use for defending against malware. After all, whether it’s a hacker or a hiccup, the result on Monday was the same, Aussie SMBs scrambling in the dark.

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‍Hidden Risks Lurking in Your Tech Stack (Exposed by the Outage)

The October 20 AWS outage shone a spotlight on some hidden vulnerabilities in many companies’ IT setups. It’s not that cloud services are bad, but our assumptions about them can be. Here are a few common risks that Aussie SMBs often overlook (until an outage or other disaster makes them painfully obvious):

• All Your Eggs in One Cloud Basket (Single-Cloud Dependency): Many businesses have 100% of their infrastructure on a single cloud provider, or even in a single region of that provider. It’s convenient and cost-effective… until that provider has a bad day. AWS, for instance, holds about 30% of the global cloud market share, and countless apps and businesses ride on its back. When AWS US-East-1 fell over, it didn’t matter if your company was in Sydney or Singapore; if your systems depended on that region, you were out of luck. Relying on one cloud vendor (or one data center) is a single point of failure. It’s like having a beautiful office with only one door, great until that door is blocked.
• SaaS Stack Fragility (Chain-Reaction Downtime): Modern SMBs run on a stack of SaaS tools, from communication (Slack, Teams) and collaboration (Atlassian, Google Workspace) to CRMs, ERPs, and industry-specific cloud apps. We love SaaS for its convenience. But here’s the rub: most SaaS providers run on the big cloud platforms. That means a problem at AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud can cascade into multiple SaaS outages at once. Monday’s incident took down dozens of major apps in one swoop. If your phone system, chat app, and customer portal all share the same cloud backend, a single outage can knock out your entire operational toolkit. This fragility is often hidden because we assume our SaaS vendors have it handled, until we’re all simultaneously staring at loading screens and error messages.
• Lack of Continuity Planning: Perhaps the most fixable (yet common) oversight is not having a Plan B. If a critical system your business relies on goes offline, what’s your workaround? Many SMBs don’t have clear answers here. Do you have data backups outside of the affected cloud? Can your team communicate on an alternate channel if your main one fails? Do you have an incident response playbook for major outages (the way you hopefully do for cyber incidents)? Often the honest answer is no, continuity planning is put off as “nice to have” or something for larger firms. The AWS outage shows why that thinking is dangerous. Outages are inevitable (cloud and SaaS downtime happens, period), so business continuity is not just an IT project, it’s a business survival mandate. Skipping it is like skipping insurance, fine until disaster strikes, then potentially fatal for your business.

These risks are usually hiding in plain sight. We get lulled by the incredible reliability cloud providers usually deliver (AWS touts 99.99% uptime for many services) and by the convenience of SaaS (no servers to maintain!). But “usually” isn’t always, and that sliver of downtime can bite hard if you’re unprepared. The key is not to abandon the cloud, but to embrace it with eyes open, identify where you’re over-exposed, and take steps to add resilience and fallbacks.

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Cloud Resilience 101: Proactive Steps to Protect Your Business

Enough about problems, let’s talk solutions. How can your business stay online, productive, and calm the next time a cloud outage or similar crisis hits? Here are smart, pragmatic steps to bolster your resilience and continuity:

• Diversify Your Cloud Footprint: Avoid the single-point-of-failure trap. If you host applications on AWS (or any one platform), consider a multi-region or multi-cloud strategy for critical systems. For example, host backup instances in an Australian AWS region (like ap-southeast-2) if your primary is in the US, or even use a secondary cloud provider (Azure, Google) for failover. The goal isn’t to double your costs, but to identify truly mission-critical workloads and give them a plan B. This could mean active failover setups or as simple as having static backup pages ready if your dynamic site goes down. Diversification also applies to SaaS apps, e.g. ensure you have alternate communication channels (even a WhatsApp group or good old phone tree) if your main chat or email platform is unavailable.
• Regular Backups and a Disaster Recovery Plan: You can’t prevent every outage, but you can bounce back fast. That starts with frequent, automated backups of your data and cloud configurations (with copies stored off the primary cloud). Equally important, have a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan that spells out how to restore operations if something major fails. This plan should answer: How will you recover data if cloud data is corrupted or inaccessible? How will you run your business if Cloud Service X is down for 24 hours? Testing this plan through drills is key, the middle of an outage is the wrong time to learn that your backups haven’t been working. With a solid Backup & DR strategy, an outage might still sting, but it won’t be a knockout punch.
• Monitoring and Early Warning Systems: Ever find out your website was down from a customer who called in? Let’s not have that happen. Implement robust monitoring for your critical infrastructure and services. Many cloud monitoring tools can alert you the moment something is failing or if response times spike. Additionally, subscribe to status alerts of your key vendors (AWS, SaaS providers), so you get texts/emails when they report issues. Early awareness gives you a head start on activating backup systems or at least informing your team and customers proactively. If you have a Managed IT provider, ensure they offer 24/7 monitoring to watch your systems like a hawk. The quicker you know about an outage, the faster you can execute your continuity measures.
• Vendor Reliability Audits (and Contingency Plans): Not all cloud and SaaS vendors are created equal. It pays to audit your critical suppliers for their uptime records, SLA guarantees, and architecture. Questions to ask: Do they run across multiple cloud regions for redundancy? How do they handle backups and recovery? Have they had notable outages before and how transparent were they? Understanding this can inform how at risk you’d be if they go down. For absolutely vital functions, consider having a secondary service in place. For example, if your primary payment platform goes down, is there a way to quickly switch to a backup processor or even manual processing? If your cloud CRM is offline, can you access a recent export of customer data to at least get phone numbers and keep sales moving? These contingencies can be the difference between a bad day and a business-ending event.
• Business Continuity Drills and Culture: Finally, make resilience part of your company culture. Conduct periodic drills for different scenarios: cloud outage, ransomware attack, etc. Even a short tabletop exercise (“Slack is down, what do we do?”) can surface weaknesses in your plan and get your team comfortable with the response process. Train employees on where to find information if systems are down (e.g. an emergency contacts list outside of your usual systems). Encourage a mindset that “tech issues happen”, so when they do, everyone knows their role in keeping the business running. When your staff is prepared and your backups are current, an outage becomes a manageable inconvenience rather than a chaotic crisis.

Building true cloud resilience isn’t about eliminating risk (that’s impossible); it’s about mitigating it to acceptable levels. Think of it like a fire drill for your IT infrastructure resilience, you hope to never need it, but you’ll sleep better knowing it’s there.

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How Inlight IT Helps You Weather the Storm

Crafting and executing all the above can feel daunting, especially if you’re already busy just running the day-to-day. This is where partnering with experts comes in. Inlight IT specializes in helping Australian SMBs build resilience into their IT stack so that even when “the cloud” has issues, your business keeps humming‍.

Here are some of the ways we put our forward-thinking, pragmatic approach into action for clients:

• Backup & Disaster Recovery (BDR): We implement robust backup solutions and full disaster-recovery planning tailored to your business. That includes automated frequent backups (on-premises and in alternate clouds), secure off-site data storage, and routine recovery drills to test that everything works. In practice, this means if AWS or any primary system crashes, you have a safe, recent copy of your data and a plan to restore it quickly. Inlight’s BDR strategies aim to get you back up in hours, not days or weeks, minimizing downtime and loss.
• Cloud Hosting & Cloud Services: Our team designs secure, scalable cloud architectures for your needs, with resilience built-in from the start. Whether it’s setting up multi-region
  redundancy in AWS, migrating certain workloads to a hybrid cloud or private cloud for better control, or managing a multi-cloud deployment, we ensure your cloud hosting is tailored to your business goals and risk tolerance. We take the complexity out of multi-cloud and failover configurations, so you get the benefits of high availability without the headache. The result: your applications and data are hosted in a way that no single point of failure will bring everything down.

• Cybersecurity & IT Security: Outages and cyberattacks are two sides of the resilience coin. Inlight’s security services not only secure your data and defend your systems from threats, but also help put the right continuity safeguards in place. This includes practices like vendor risk management (vetting and monitoring your third-party providers so a lapse on their end doesn’t become your crisis), identity management and zero-trust networking (so even if one cloud service falters, your security isn’t), and incident response planning. We believe business continuity is a core part of IT security, after all, keeping systems operational is a security goal, too. By hardening your infrastructure and having emergency plans, we reduce both the chance of breaches and the impact of any downtime event.
• Managed IT Services & Support: When the unexpected happens, be it an AWS outage or any IT hiccup, it pays to have experts on call. Inlight’s Managed IT Services & Support provide you with 24/7 monitoring, helpdesk support, and strategic guidance for your entire IT environment. Our Australian-based team becomes an extension of your business, watching your systems day and night so that we can react immediately to issues (often before you even notice them). We handle the heavy lifting of updates, patches, backup management, and vendor liaison. And when something like a major outage strikes, we’ll troubleshoot, communicate with suppliers on your behalf, and do whatever it takes to keep your staff productive. It’s like having a full IT department and a war-room team in your back pocket, so you’re never alone in dealing with IT crises.

By leveraging services like these, Backup & DR, Cloud Hosting, Security, and Managed IT Support, you’re essentially investing in peace of mind. You get a forward-thinking partner (that’s us, Inlight IT) who is always looking out for your business continuity and growth, using plain English and technical precision to craft solutions that fit. The next time AWS or any critical technology stumbles, you won’t be scrambling; you’ll already have the safety nets in place.

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Turning an Outage into Action: The Road Ahead

If this outage has taught us anything, it’s that hope is not a strategy. Hoping that “the cloud never goes down” is wishful thinking, instead, plan for when it does. The businesses that fared best this week were the ones who could say: “Alright, Plan A is unavailable, let’s switch to Plan B.” Those without a Plan B… well, they were stuck watching the clock, burning money and goodwill.

The silver lining (yes, even this cloud outage has one) is that it’s a wake-up call. Just like high-profile cyber breaches have pushed companies to up their security game, this outage is pushing all of us to up our cloud resilience and business continuity game. As an Aussie SMB decision-maker, you have the opportunity right now to take proactive steps so that when the next outage or incident hits, and it will, someday, your business sails through it with confidence.

No more assuming “she’ll be right” when it comes to uptime. Be informed, be prepared, and be proactive. Assess your risks, shore up those weak points in your tech stack, and get expert help where needed. Your goal is not zero downtime (nice as that would be) but controlled downtime, meaning even if the cloud gods throw a tantrum, you’ve got fallback options and a team ready to respond.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed, or just want to ensure nothing’s overlooked? We’re here to help. Inlight IT has decades of experience turning IT uncertainties into competitive advantages for Australian businesses. Let us help you build a resilient, secure, and future-proof IT environment for your SMB. Don’t wait for the next outage or cyber scare to take action. Reach out to us for a Cloud Resilience Consultation, we’ll review your current setup, identify hidden risks, and map out practical steps to strengthen your continuity plan.

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Ready to safeguard your business? Inlight IT can Help

Book a consultation with Inlight IT or explore our Managed IT Services, Cloud Hosting, Backup & DR, and Security solutions today.

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