The massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) disruption that rippled across the internet last month offered a sobering reminder of how dependent modern life has become on invisible infrastructure. The outage, traced to Amazon’s U.S.-East-1 region — said to be the company’s oldest and most interconnected cloud hub — temporarily knocked offline websites, applications and platforms worldwide.
For the physical and cybersecurity communities alike, it spotlighted the cascading risk of centralization in the cloud era.
While the incident did not appear to stem from a cyberattack, its impact was similar to a denial-of-service event on a global scale, according to news reports. Numerous cloud-hosted systems and software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms used by security organizations were affected, interrupting everything from video analytics dashboards to access-control monitoring portals. It was a vivid demonstration that resilience — and not just protection — must now be part of every organization’s security posture.
The Physical Roots of Digital Dependence
Ian Massey, Head of Corporate Intelligence, EMEA, at global cybersecurity and intelligence firm S-RM, notes that the rush toward digital transformation has obscured a crucial reality: The cloud still runs on tangible assets.
“While the digitalization of business is one of today’s mega trends as its pace continues to accelerate, it’s easy to forget that it is underpinned by a vast network of physical infrastructure, from data centres and fibre optic cables to power generation and distribution assets,” Massey says.
He adds that “the AWS outage highlights the increasingly critical role of digital infrastructure in modern societies and businesses.” These systems require “constant management in the face of increasing demand for capacity and against an increasingly complex geopolitical and regulatory backdrop.”
In other words, the internet’s smooth façade masks a web of interconnected dependencies, each one a potential point of failure. When a problem hits a core service such as DNS resolution or identity management inside a major region like U.S.-East-1, the resulting ripple can reach organizations that may not even realize their systems rely on that infrastructure.
Multi-Cloud as a Shield
The outage reignited discussion around the need for multi-cloud and multi-region strategies, an architectural approach that can limit business disruption when a single provider stumbles. Jamil Ahmed, Director and Distinguished Engineer at Solace, points out that “even the largest cloud hosts — Google, AWS (as we have just seen), Microsoft — suffer from outages.”
“Having all your digital eggs in one cloud basket leaves businesses at risk of serious failure as we keep on seeing,” Ahmed says. “These businesses need to build a fault tolerance into their infrastructure, a buffer that enables their business to always remain operational and to ride the outages.”
According to Ahmed, organizations already using event-driven architecture (EDA) within a multi-cloud environment are seeing measurable gains in uptime and flexibility. “When a business is multi-cloud, the end user should never even be able to detect that a failure has occurred,” he explains. The continuity comes from what he calls an “event mesh” — a data-movement layer that lets workloads dynamically shift among providers or regions to maintain performance and availability.
For security professionals, the lesson extends beyond IT operations. Availability is a pillar of the CIA triad — confidentiality, integrity and availability — but it is often the least prioritized in planning and risk modeling. The AWS outage underscored that downtime can undermine not only customer experience but also critical security functions such as log collection, authentication and incident response.
In an increasingly connected world, both Massey and Ahmed emphasize that resilience is no longer just about redundancy, but about understanding interdependencies and designing for graceful failure. As Ahmed notes, “Businesses who proactively adopted multi-cloud strategies... are already reaping the benefits of stronger and more resilient infrastructures.”
Quiz