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If your favorite app wouldn’t load this morning, you weren’t alone. Amazon Web Services (AWS) - the cloud backbone behind a huge slice of the internet - had a major hiccup in its US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region in the early hours today. Reports began around ~3:00 a.m. ET, with recovery signs a couple hours later. By mid-morning, Amazon said the underlying issue had been fully mitigated. Still, the ripple effects were hard to miss: services like Snapchat, Zoom, Signal, Fortnite, Coinbase/Robinhood, Perplexity, and even airline sites such as Delta and United saw issues at points during the incident. DownDetector tallied millions of outage reports across the globe. The Verge
First, what is AWS?
Think of AWS as industrial-grade utilities for computing: on-demand servers, storage, databases, and networks that businesses rent instead of buying and maintaining themselves. Thousands of brands (from startups to airlines) run pieces of their tech on AWS. That’s efficient and usually very reliable, but it also means when a core AWS service stumbles, lots of familiar apps feel it at the same time. TechRadar
What happened today (plain English)
Early updates pointed to problems centered in US-EAST-1, with AWS reporting increased error rates/latency in multiple services. As the morning went on, AWS said the underlying issue was fully mitigated; several outlets and status pages attributed the disruption to a DNS-related issue - the internet’s “phonebook” that helps apps find where to connect. When DNS is unhappy, traffic gets lost. Geekwire
Quick facts from today:
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Start window: around 2:40–3:11 a.m. ET based on monitoring spikes and newsroom timelines.
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Scope: widespread impact tied to US-EAST-1 with global knock-ons.
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Examples affected: Snapchat, Zoom, Perplexity, Fortnite, Coinbase/Robinhood; airline sites including Delta/United at points.
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Scale: ~6.5 million user outage reports logged by DownDetector across markets.
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Status: AWS reported the issue fully mitigated as of late morning. Newsweek
Why this matters (even if your business didn’t notice)
Today’s event is a reminder of how interconnected our technology is. Your CRM, phones, website forms, payments, email security, and even door cameras might depend on a cloud region you’ve never heard of. The cloud is still the right call for most small businesses - cost-effective, secure, and resilient - but resilience isn’t automatic. It’s something we can design for.
Practical steps to stay resilient
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Know your dependencies (vendor map). List your critical apps and note where they live (e.g., AWS region, Microsoft Azure region). Many vendors publish this in their docs or status pages.
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Multi-region or multi-provider options (where it counts). For truly critical services—phones, e-commerce checkout, scheduling—ask vendors about failover across regions/providers or consider secondary tools you can switch to in a pinch.
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Status signal playbook. Bookmark service status pages (e.g., AWS Health Dashboard, your CRM/phone provider status) and DownDetector as a corroboration tool. Designate who on your team checks what when things wobble.
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Communicate fast, simply. Have a short, pre-approved customer message: “We’re experiencing a provider outage affecting X. No data risk is known. Next update at HH:MM.”
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Test remote-work fallback. If your office internet or a single SaaS tool is the bottleneck, ensure your team can temporarily work from mobile hotspots or switch to an alternative workflow.
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Backups and exports. Keep routine data backups and have offline or alternate access for critical records (customer lists, active proposals).
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Cyber ≠ outage, but… Even when it’s “just” an outage, keep MFA on, patch regularly, and watch for phishing that piggybacks on breaking news (“Click here to restore access”). Guidance from CISA is excellent for small teams.
Our take: stay calm, stay prepared
Cloud hiccups make headlines because they touch so many of us at once. The good news: providers like AWS are engineered for rapid recovery - and most downtime windows are short. With a modest resilience plan, small businesses can handle days like today with minimal disruption. If you’d like a quick, no-pressure review of your vendor map and fallback plan, we’re happy to help.
- Ekaru | Friendly, local IT & cybersecurity for small business
About the author:
Ann Westerheim, PhD is the Founder and President of Ekaru, a Technology Service Provider of cybersecurity and IT services for small and medium businesses in the greater Boston area. Ann is an accomplished technology innovator and leader with three engineering degrees from MIT. She has twenty years of high tech experience in research, advanced development, product development, and as an entrepreneur. Her career has spanned a vast range of technology endeavors including research in thin film semiconductors and superconductors, microprocessor fabrication, development of early Internet medical applications, and now focusing on the application of technology in business. She has an avid focus on the "last mile" of technology and decreasing the digital divide.