Deep Dive – what exactly happened with the AWS DNS Outage

• Finance and payments: Transaction failures and delayed settlements.
• E-commerce and retail: Checkout disruption, lost sales, and abandoned carts.
• Communications and collaboration: Messaging and presence services degraded.

These impacts highlight how relying on cloud services in specific regions can turn a technical fault into a major business risk. SMBs must review their service dependencies and recovery priorities *before* the next outage occurs.

The financial consequences ranged from immediate lost sales to longer-term costs like having to manually process orders, dealing with a surge in customer support calls, and spending time figuring out what went wrong. Operationally, teams had to stop their regular work to fix the problem, and relying on other companies’ services often made recovery times longer. Major cloud outages can cost industries millions, or even hundreds of millions, depending on how long they last and how widespread they are. SMBs face smaller, but still very significant, losses relative to their income. These realities show why it’s worth investing in backup systems and clear plans for recovery.

AWS Disaster Recovery Architectures for Regional Outages

However, what transpires if an entire region or availability zone experiences an outage? In such circumstances, maintaining a backup would be prudent, and most distributed systems are equipped with continuous backup mechanisms. Nevertheless, this constitutes only one facet of ensuring system resilience. The predominant challenge resides in orchestrating the recovery workflow to facilitate the immediate provisioning of new systems, with traffic being rerouted to operational systems in the event of a failure.

Disaster Recovery Architectures, JJ Paul, 2023

The challenge of managing recovery and rerouting online traffic during a regional outage highlights how crucial strong disaster recovery plans are.

Businesses can significantly reduce the risk of outages by combining backup DNS systems, good monitoring, strategies that use multiple cloud providers, and tested disaster recovery plans. These plans should specifically address the weak points identified in events like the AWS DNS outage. Having backup DNS provides alternative ways for the internet’s “phonebook” to work, monitoring helps you spot problems early, and a disaster recovery plan ensures your business can keep running. Below is a simple action list of practical prevention measures SMBs can implement quickly, followed by a table comparing the cost, complexity, and recommendations for each approach.

DNS redundancy means setting up your website’s “phonebook” information with more than one provider. So, if one provider has a problem, the others can still direct traffic to your site, keeping it online. For SMBs, this means choosing a managed DNS provider, setting up backup name servers, and testing that it works during planned maintenance. This approach reduces the risk of a single point of failure and works well with strategies that spread your services across different regions.

DNS Resilience and Redundancy in Cloud Hosting

This paper analyses the extent to which the Internet’s global domain name resolution (DNS) system has preserved its distributed resilience given the rise of cloud-based hosting and infrastructure. We explore trends in the concentration of the DNS space since at least 2011. In addition, we examine changes in domains’ tendency to “diversify” their pool of nameservers – how frequently domains employ DNS management services from multiple providers rather than just one provider – a comparatively costless and therefore puzzlingly rare decision that could supply redundancy and resilience in the event of an attack or service outage affecting one provider.

Evidence of decreasing internet entropy: the lack of redundancy in dns resolution by major websites and services, 2018

It’s surprising how few businesses use multiple DNS providers for backup, even though it’s a relatively easy way to make their online presence more resilient.

Multi-cloud and hybrid strategies involve spreading your online services across more than one cloud provider or combining your own servers with cloud resources. This helps avoid relying too heavily on a single location or provider. The benefits include less risk if one provider has an issue and the ability to switch services over with less downtime. However, these approaches can be more complex to manage and potentially more expensive. For SMBs, good starting points often include having backups in a different cloud region or using a mix of your own systems and cloud services, rather than trying to move everything to multiple clouds at once. Choosing the right approach means balancing the benefits of resilience with the effort of managing it.

Proactive maintenance includes regular updates, backups, and constant monitoring that simulates how users interact with your site to catch problems early. Routine checks should cover your website’s “phonebook” entries, security certificates, and database connections, with monitoring happening daily or even hourly for critical services. A good maintenance schedule often involves weekly content checks and monthly reviews of your website’s underlying systems, plus automated alerts for serious failures. Regular maintenance helps you find and fix problems faster, directly limiting the impact on your income and reputation.

Australian SMBs should see the AWS outage as a clear example of the risks of putting all your eggs in one basket, the importance of having tested emergency plans, and the value of combining technical resilience with clear customer communication and search engine readiness. Relying too much on a single cloud location makes you more vulnerable. Meanwhile, using automation and monitoring can speed up recovery and reduce the manual effort needed during an incident. Local businesses should prioritise having backups in different regions, using multiple DNS providers, and having strategies to maintain customer trust and search performance if outages occur.