AWS Outage Exposes Cloud Dependency, Concentration Risks

Forrester's Brent Ellis and Dario Maisto on Lessons Learned for Large Enterprises Akshaya Asokan (asokan_akshaya) • October 24, 2025

The cascading outage across the U.S. East Coast triggered this week by a domain name system failure inside Amazon Web Services' DynamoDB service demonstrates the risks of deep cloud architectural dependencies and the challenges of building true multi-region cloud resilience, said Brent Ellis, principal analyst at Forrester.

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Cloud-based services rely on both internally developed code and vendor applications, as sorting through the dependencies within cloud architectures is difficult for large enterprises. That's why many organizations still aren't ready to pay the price for fault tolerance - building redundancies, improving error detection and installing recovery mechanisms to avoid a complete system shutdown, Ellis said.

"If people really want to address this issue, they have to start from scratch and ...