In the latest edition of our blogs from the desk of a CISO, CyberNorth’s Lead for Cyber & FinTech, Jon Holden, shares his thoughts on the recent AWS outage.
The Cloud is Amazing, But Not Magic: What the AWS Outage Taught Us
This week, we saw a rare wobble in the system.
When AWS took a breather, a ripple of downtime hit thousands of businesses globally. And, predictably, the first scream was: “It’s a cyber attack!”
Our inboxes and Slack channels went wild. Everyone jumped to the conclusion that a massive hacker group had finally breached the ultimate wall.
But here’s the key takeaway, and why I still love the cloud: It was not an attack.
It was a complex operational fault—a very, very rare internal system failure deep inside AWS’s US-EAST-1 region that just cascaded. No shadowy adversaries, no data stolen, no ransomware. Just the most sophisticated piece of human engineering ever created reminding us, gently, that it’s still human-made.
A Masterclass in Cloud Recovery
As a massive advocate for cloud architecture, what happened next was the real story—and frankly, a huge win for the cloud model.
AWS had a monumental incident on its hands, yet their response was world-class. Services were restored within hours, communications were transparent and clear, and their updates were impeccable.
People focus too much on prevention. This was a vivid, real-world lesson that resilience is defined by recovery. It’s about how quickly and cleanly you can get back up when physics and complexity inevitably rear their heads.
AWS didn’t panic. They didn’t point fingers. They used calm, disciplined, engineering-first leadership to solve the problem. That’s the benefit of trusting a platform built by the world’s best. That’s what good looks like.
The Cloud is a Shared Responsibility, Not a Bulletproof Vest
The cloud is the greatest leap forward for business technology we have ever seen. But this incident is a crucial reminder that while the hyperscalers—AWS, Azure, GCP—are the most secure and reliable platforms on Earth, they are not a substitute for our own due diligence.
For us building modern digital services, this is a positive, loud call to action: Multi-cloud resilience and geographic diversity are the next level of intelligent architecture.
Just look at a provider like Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which designs its infrastructure with regional isolation and automated fail-over as defining principles. That’s the mindset! We have the power to engineer our systems to be even more robust by utilizing the immense power of multiple cloud regions and providers.
The question isn’t if your cloud provider is reliable—they are! The question is:
- Are we leveraging that reliability by spreading our critical apps across regions or providers?
- Do we have a plan to use the cloud’s inherent strengths to jump to another region if the unthinkable happens?
- Have we tested that fail-over?
The cloud handles the infrastructure security, but our own service resilience is our responsibility.
Operational Excellence is Cyber Excellence
It’s an outdated idea to separate an “IT outage” from a “cyber incident.” Service disruption, customer frustration, brand damage—the end results are identical.
That’s why at CyberNorth, we encourage everyone to treat operational resilience as the ultimate security posture. It means using the cloud’s incredible tools to ensure continuity.
The AWS event is a clear example of why the pursuit of operational perfection and top-tier cybersecurity are one and the same. It showed us the power of a giant, complex organization executing a response flawlessly.
The North East Cyber Community: Leveraging the Cloud
For our members and partners, this is a practical moment to level up our cloud game:
- Optimize Architectures: Truly map where single-points of failure exist and use the cloud’s global scale to eliminate them.
- Test Fail-over: Add a “major cloud regional outage” to your drills. It’s a fantastic way to validate your multi-region setup.
- Trust the Transparency: Use the detailed post-mortems from AWS to better inform your own recovery plans.
CyberNorth connects people and technology. This event reinforces why a collaborative region that shares best practices on how to use the cloud’s incredible power is so critical.
Final Thought: Celebrate the Recovery
This week’s AWS outage was not a hack.
It was a rare moment where the world’s leading cloud platform demonstrated world-class recovery capabilities. It was a massive, public display of why investing in calm, engineering-led leadership pays off.
So when something wobbles, let’s not instantly shout “attack.”
Let’s instead ask the most intelligent question: “How quickly and well can we recover thanks to the amazing platforms we build on?”
That’s the real measure of our cyber maturity—and the heart of a truly resilient region.
