What Businesses Can Learn from the AWS Outage
On 20 October 2025, business processes around the world ground to a halt as Amazon Web Services (AWS) went offline due to a technical error at one of its US data centres.
As companies on several continents scrambled to restore their data and recoup millions of dollars in losses, the cybersecurity community’s focus turned to the vulnerabilities of a world dominated by three major cloud giants and the urgent need for multiple types of backup.
Let’s unpack the recent AWS service failure, find out what it means for data security, and highlight some ways that your business can keep its files safe by not putting all your data in one basket.
AWS Goes Down, Sparking Global Panic
Amazon Web Services, along with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, make up the lion’s share of cloud-based storage worldwide.
When a single technical fault at an AWS data centre caused widespread business impact that took several financial apps such as Robinhood and Vemmo, and popular social meadia apps, including Snapchat and Reddit offline, the power of one glitch to cause digital chaos was on full display.
Despite Amazon having resolved the issue and businesses being back online later the same day, many companies are still counting the financial and reputational cost of the outage, Amazon itself included.
In the week of this major outage, which is certainly not the first of its kind to affect major providers in recent years, cybersecurity providers were reminded that multiple backup methods remain the safest way to ensure comprehensive data security.
- While secure cloud storage is generally the gold standard in data backup, the possibility of an outage of the kind that affected AWS recurring in the future is not zero.
- As a result, it’s imperative for businesses to not only back up their data automatically in the cloud but also invest in a hard drive backup.
The main lesson from the AWS outage is to always back up your data in the cloud and have a backup for your backup.
The Case for Hybrid and Hard Drive Backups
Soteria Cloud’s Total Data Protection package allows a precise copy of the contents of your physical drive to be stored securely (including via initial seeding service) and updated on a regular basis.
Customers using this service benefit from expanded peace of mind arising from multiple layers of protection.
- On a practical level, if a file fails to back up due to a cloud-syncing error, a copy of the same file stored on your hard drive can still be backed up to the cloud at the next scheduled run.
- Having multiple copies of sensitive files enhances the safety of your data, giving you the ability to retrieve it from more than one location in the event of a cyberattack or outage.
While technology may never be perfect, taking a proactive and multi-layered approach to data security can help you keep all your important business data encrypted, accessible, and ready to be retrieved when needed.
To learn more about our Total Data Protection package and how it can keep your data safe, click the button below. One product, zero compromise – all you need to detect, protect and recover