Planning for the Next Outage: What E-commerce Merchants Should Do after the Amazon Web Services Disaster

Planning for the Next Outage: What E-commerce Merchants Should Do after the Amazon Web Services Disaster

Yesterday’s massive outage of AWS — centered in its US-EAST-1 region and caused by a DNS resolution problem cascading through critical subsystems — is a wake-up call for every e-commerce business that depends on cloud infrastructure.

For a merchant operating on the web (and likely relying on AWS or other cloud platforms), the question isn’t if an outage will happen, but when and how well you’ll be prepared. Here’s a structured article for the readers of Racklify News on how to plan, survive, and recover.

1. What happened (and why it matters)

• On October 20, 2025, AWS reported widespread disruptions — starting around 3:11 AM ET — due to DNS resolution failures in US-EAST-1.

• Because so many platforms, services, payment systems and backend infrastructures rely on AWS, the outage rippled across banking apps (Venmo, Robinhood), social platforms (Snapchat, Reddit), logistics, e-commerce and more.

• For e-commerce merchants: the consequences can include downtime of storefront, payment failures, order processing delays, inventory system stoppage, customer service disruption, reputational damage and revenue loss. Analysts estimate losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars for major platforms in just a few hours.

• The root cause: Even though data may be intact, the failure of core services (DNS, load-balancers, region availability zones) creates an integrity/availability failure. As one commentator put it: “Until we better understand and protect integrity, our total focus on uptime is an illusion.”

Why it matters for merchants

• Many e-commerce stacks are built on top of cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, caching, databases, CDN, payment gateways). If your underlying cloud provider has a major outage, even if your app is perfect, you can still be offline.

• If you rely on a single region or single provider (like US-EAST-1 or one availability zone), you inherit that provider’s risk.

• During peak times (sales events, Black Friday, etc) the cost of downtime is magnified — not only in direct lost sales, but in lost customer trust.

• Support and recovery take time. Even when service is declared “restored,” there may be backlogs, delayed message processing, degraded performance for hours.

2. Key steps for planning resilience

Below are actionable steps merchants should take now — before the next outage — to reduce risk, limit damage and recover more quickly.

a) Map your dependency graph

• Inventory your tech stack: Document all the services your store uses — web servers, app servers, databases, caching, order-management, payment gateway, fulfillment integration, CRM, analytics.

• Identify provider and region dependencies: Which services run in which cloud provider? Are you reliant on a single region (e.g., AWS US-EAST-1)? Are there dependencies on one CDN, one payment provider, one fulfillment system?

• Highlight single points of failure: For example: a database cluster in one region; a third-party API (e.g., shipping label generation) that runs only on one provider.

• Quantify impact: What happens if service X is down? Can you continue to take orders? Is checkout still working? Are fulfillment still dispatching? What’s the revenue impact for each hour of downtime?

b) Diversification & fallback architecture

• Multi-region deployment: If you are on AWS, consider utilizing more than one Availability Zone (AZ) and more than one Region. For critical services, replicate across regions.

• Multi-cloud options: Where practical, use a secondary cloud provider (e.g., Microsoft Corporation Azure or Google LLC Cloud) for critical segments of your stack.

• Critical external services review: Payment gateways, shipping APIs, analytics — do you have fallback options? If your primary shipping API is down, is there a backup?

• Graceful degradation: Design your system such that if one part fails, you reduce functionality but stay online. For example: enable checkout only for certain SKUs, disable non-critical features (recommendations, live chat) when infrastructure is impaired.

c) Monitoring, alerting & status management

• Real-time status dashboards: Monitor key KPIs — site uptime, checkout success rate, payment gateway latency/errors, API call failures, fulfillment queue depth.

• Third-party status providers: Subscribe to status alerts from your cloud provider (AWS Status), dependencies, and use independent monitors (e.g., Downdetector-style) to detect problems early.

• Communications plan: Have pre-written templates for customer communications (email, in-site banner, social) to alert users when outages occur, outline what you know and what you’re doing. Being transparent builds trust.

• Runbook & escalation: Who in the team handles which scenario? Document escalation paths, who contacts cloud provider support, who triggers the communication plan, who enables failover architecture.

d) Backup & failover readiness

• Data replication & backups: Ensure databases and critical systems are backed up and replicated across regions/providers. Regularly test restore from backup.

• Failover testing: Periodically simulate outages (e.g., Region A goes down) and verify region/zone failover works: can you route traffic to Region B, is your DNS updated, are caches warmed, is the database live?

• DNS & routing readiness: A DNS failure (as in yesterday’s AWS incident) can defeat simple redundancy. Ensure your DNS provider is robust, your TTLs are low when switching, and you know how to reroute traffic quickly.

• Cache warm-up & CDNs: In a failover scenario, cold caches slow performance. Pre-prime caches, or have strategies to prevent cold-start when shifting traffic to fallback locations.

e) Business-continuity beyond infrastructure

• Payment & checkout fallback: If your primary payment gateway is unavailable (perhaps because it relies on the same cloud region), have a secondary gateway queued and ready.
• Fulfilment & order processing: If your WMS or order-management system goes down, can your warehouse still fulfil orders manually, or with a reduced interface?
• Customer service & communication: Prepare your customer service team with scripts and priority queues to deal with influx of tickets when systems degrade.
• Insurance & SLA reviews: Review your contract with your cloud provider and critical vendors. Understand their downtime SLA, their credit schedule, and whether you need business-interruption insurance for cloud outages.

3. Case-study implications for e-commerce from yesterday’s outage

• Since yesterday’s outage at AWS impacted services that many merchants use, it serves as a practical illustration of risk. From the reports: major platforms and retailers were affected.

• Even if your site remains technically up, you may be vulnerable indirectly — e.g., payment service down, shipping label service down, CDN impact, or slow-downs that reduce conversion.

• The fact that the problem stemmed from DNS / internal service failures means: even if you deploy multi-AZ in the same Region, you could still be impacted if the Region’s core services fail. This underscores the need for multi-region design.

• For a merchant using AWS US-EAST-1 for their primary infrastructure, it’s worth asking: would we have failed over? How long would it take? Could we switch traffic to US-WEST-2 or another cloud entirely?

• For merchants using a hosted e-commerce platform (SaaS) that runs on AWS, you should ask your platform provider: What region are you in? What’s your failover plan? Did your provider suffer yesterday? How long were you impaired?

4. Action checklist for the next 30-90 days

Here’s a practical list you can run through:

• Audit your stack: Create a dependency map and single-points of failure list.

• Review your cloud architecture: Identify region/provider concentration; plan secondary region or cloud.

• Test failover: Schedule a failover drill — switch traffic to backup region or provider, measure recovery time (RTO) and data loss (RPO).

• Review DNS strategy: Ensure you can update DNS quickly, have low TTLs for emergency switching, have backup DNS provider.

• Evaluate critical third-party services: Payment gateway, shipping API, analytics, CRM — ensure each has contingency.

• Train teams & prepare communications: Ensure customer-service, devops, product teams know what to do when infrastructure fails. Ice-breaker drills help.

• Prepare customer-facing messaging: Draft templates for site banner, email, social. Transparency reduces frustration.

• Review monitoring & alerting: Are you watching the right KPIs? Are alerts configured to detect early signs (e.g., API error spike, region latency increase)?

• Backup business processes: Store orders offline if necessary, maintain manual fulfilment backlog processes, have manual order entry fallback.

• Review contracts & insurance: Understand your provider’s SLA credits, and whether you need business-interruption cover for cloud outages.

5. Final thoughts

The AWS outage yesterday underscores the reality: even the largest cloud provider is not immune to failure. For e-commerce merchants, this means resilience planning is no longer optional — it’s essential. You may never be able to eliminate all risk, but you can manage and mitigate risk through diversification, preparedness and clear processes.

By taking the steps above, merchants can reduce the likelihood of being knocked offline for hours or being unable to serve customers at a critical moment. And in the event of an outage, you’ll be in a position to respond quickly, maintain trust, and recover business operations with minimal damage.