The problem with having all of your eggs in one basket (or how the AWS outage broke the internet this week)

On October 20th, 2025, the internet stumbled. Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud provider, suffered a multi-region outage that rippled across websites, apps, and services from streaming platforms to smart-home devices. For several tense hours, thousands of companies and millions of users watched critical systems grind to a halt.

It was a vivid reminder of an old saying that’s more relevant than ever in the digital age: don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

This week’s outage originated in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region one of the provider’s most heavily used data centers when a routine DNS routing issue snowballed into widespread service disruptions.

Major platforms relying on AWS (including productivity tools, e-commerce sites, and financial apps) suddenly went dark. Even companies that didn’t directly use Amazon’s cloud were affected because some of their vendors did.

The internet’s modern structure is incredibly efficient - and dangerously interconnected. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together run a massive share of global online infrastructure. When one of them has a bad day, the rest of us feel it.

On the topic of keeping all of your eggs in one basket in business, centralization seems convenient: fewer contracts, one management portal, unified billing. But in IT, centralization is a potential single point of failure. Here’s why:

1. One failure can bring down everything.
   If your application, backups, and DNS are all in one region or under one vendor, a regional failure can stop your entire operation cold.
2. Dependencies stack up.
   Your service might depend on an API, which depends on a content delivery network, which depends on AWS. Even if you didn’t “choose” AWS, your vendors might have, putting you indirectly in the same basket.
3. You give up control.
   Cloud platforms handle networking, hardware, and redundancy behind the scenes, but that also means you can’t fix issues when they arise. You’re at the mercy of their timeline.
4. The risk is underestimated.
   AWS boasts impressive uptime, but “four nines” (99.99%) still allows for minutes or hours of downtime each year and that downtime doesn’t always respect business hours.

Smart organizations treat outages as lessons, not just inconveniences. Here’s four ways to use this AWS outage to avoid outages in your own business:

1. Diversify your infrastructure.
   Use multiple regions within a provider, or consider hybrid/multi-cloud setups that spread your workloads. Even partial diversification - hosting backups or failover sites elsewhere, makes a big difference.
2. Understand your dependency map.
   List every critical app and note which vendor or platform it depends on. You may be surprised how much ties back to a single provider.
3. Test your failover plans.
   Don’t assume your systems will automatically recover. Simulate provider outages and see what happens, better to learn during a test than during a real outage.
4. Communicate transparently with customers.
   If downtime occurs, explain it clearly and provide updates. Trust can survive outages; it doesn’t survive silence.

Centralizing on one platform is seductive. It’s simpler, cheaper (at first), and well-supported. But as this week’s outage showed, convenience has a cost: fragility.

A manufacturer wouldn’t buy all its parts from a single supplier without a contingency plan. Yet many businesses effectively do that with their digital infrastructure until an outage exposes the risk. Even small businesses hosting their website, email, and CRM all on one platform can be affected when that provider goes down.

Diversification doesn’t mean abandoning the cloud. It means designing for resilience, making sure one provider’s problem isn’t automatically yours.

The AWS outage of 2025 won’t be the last, and it wasn’t the first. Cloud computing is still the backbone of the modern web, but that backbone needs reinforcement.
Businesses large and small can take this as a signal to review their architecture, assess where they’re most exposed, and invest in redundancy that fits their size and budget.

Because in the end, “the cloud” is just someone else’s computer - and sometimes, someone else’s computer goes offline.

The takeaway? The internet didn’t break because AWS failed, it broke because too many businesses put everything in one basket. It’s time to spread the eggs, Valley Techlogic can be your source for resilient IT planning that deliberately avoids any unnecessary downtime. Learn more today with a consultation.

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This article was powered by Valley Techlogic, leading provider of trouble free IT services for businesses in California including Merced, Fresno, Stockton & More. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on X at https://x.com/valleytechlogic and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/valley-techlogic-inc/.