The AWS Outage Was a Wake-Up Call. Were You Prepared?

By Mark Mahle, Founder & CEO, NetActuate‍

This week, the internet blinked.

On Monday, a DNS misconfiguration at AWS’s oldest and most critical data center—US-East-1—triggered a cascading outage that brought down a “Who’s Who” of the modern digital economy: Amazon, Coinbase, Ring, Canva, Verizon, Signal, AppleTV, and many more. For hours, users couldn’t shop, message, stream, or work. Behind the scenes, millions of dollars evaporated.

According to this TechRadar article, industry analysts estimate this single outage may have cost upwards of $75 million per hour in lost revenue.

In this Forbes article, Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint (a netActuate Customer), said that the impact of the outage could "easily reach into the hundreds of billions" from lost productivity and halted business operations.

But this wasn’t just an eCommerce disruption. When platforms like Signal go dark, it impacts far more than personal messaging. These are tools used by governments, journalists, healthcare workers, and first responders around the globe. The consequences of that silence are hard to quantify but very real.

The Alarming Trend: Outages Are Becoming the Norm

In the past five years, the major hyperscalers—AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud—have experienced at least 11 major outages. What’s more, the frequency of these major outages appears to be increasing. If your infrastructure is single-cloud, single-region, or dependent on a single DNS provider, your business is a sitting duck.

NetActuate Customers? Unaffected.

While much of the internet was in chaos, NetActuate customers weren’t affected. Our clients—running on our global edge infrastructure, interconnected via our Anycast-powered network spanning 45+ global PoPs—continued serving users without downtime.

Why? Because redundant, resilient, and geographically distributed DNS and networking in today’s economy is a necessity. At NetActuate, we build networks designed to withstand these exact types of failures. We don’t rely on shared hyperscaler platforms to deliver uptime.

DNS Is Your Business Front Door

It appears a simple DNS error at one of the most advanced technology companies in the world was all it took to cripple the internet for many hours.

DNS is often overlooked and misunderstood in terms of networking infrastructure. It’s also the first point of failure in many outages. That’s why we believe companies must take back control of their digital front door—and that means leveraging Anycast and custom global routing strategies, not just relying on a major hyperscalers shared platform.

Multi-Cloud Solutions

The Forbes article goes on to point out three strategic pillars for building in resilience across clouds:

Workload Portability: Proprietary, vendor-specific cloud services lock users into one cloud environment. Using open data standards, tooling, and APIs that can work between clouds—as well as VMs, colo, bare metal, and on-prem—prevents this. We even wrote an eBook to address this problem: Architecting for Openness.
Automated Failover: Automated systems that monitor traffic across providers and reroute seamlessly in case of a disruption are paramount. We believe the best way to do this is with BGP Anycast and we have helped hundreds of customers mitigate outages in this way.
Data Sovereignty and Residency: Regional regulations that require data to be stored in specific geographic locations are on the rise, creating a new geopolitics of the internet and AI. We’re thought leaders in this space and help customers ensure compliance.

The World Leader in DNS and Anycast

NetActuate is the industry leader in designing and deploying bespoke Anycast networking solutions tailored to specific business requirements. DNS is in our DNA and dozens of DNS solution providers rely on us, including SafeDNS.

Our team of networking experts can show you how to build resilient global architectures that keep your services online when others go dark.

If your current architecture didn’t survive the October AWS outage, now is the time to fix that. Let’s talk outage prevention, BGP Anycast networking, and DNS best practices.

Schedule a call with our team today.

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