ARTICLE | October 24, 2025

The AWS Outage: A Wake-Up Call for Every Business

October 20th’s AWS disruption rippled across industries. Dozens of SaaS platforms, e-commerce sites, and internal business tools went offline for hours. While AWS quickly restored service, the impact revealed how dependent small businesses are on cloud providers—and how few have contingency plans when those providers stumble.

“Cloud resilience isn’t about assuming Amazon or Microsoft will never fail—it’s about assuming they will, and ensuring you can adapt,” said Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, in a recent post about cloud dependency.

Why Resilience Starts with RTO and RPO

Every business has different tolerance levels for downtime and data loss. These are captured in two key metrics:

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How long you can afford for a system to be down before it seriously impacts your operations.
• RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data you can afford to lose between the last backup and the incident.

Example:
If your RTO for your accounting software is four hours, and your RPO is 30 minutes, your system architecture should allow you to restore operations within that window and lose no more than 30 minutes of data.

The Process: How to Define and Apply These Metrics

1. Identify Critical Systems
   Start by listing all your key systems—from email to inventory management. Rank them by business impact.
2. Define RTO and RPO for Each
   Discuss internally: how long can we be down before losing revenue or customer trust? How much data can we risk losing?
3. Architect for Your Tolerances
   Based on those metrics, you can determine whether to use cloud redundancy, local failover, or hybrid backups.
4. Test Regularly
   The best plan is only as good as your last test. Run simulated outages to verify that your recovery time and data protection align with your objectives.

Resilience Isn’t Just About Technology

Technology is only part of the equation. Preparedness is cultural—it involves communication, decision-making, and prioritization. The AWS outage showed how many organizations had no clear playbook for communicating with customers or switching to backup workflows. This is a reminder that organizational leaders need to make these types of decisions a priority and proactively prepare their staff and client communication for these types of events.

“Disaster recovery planning used to be for data centers. Today, it’s for every business that relies on the cloud,” notes Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Continuity report.

The Bottom Line: Be Ready for the Unexpected

Even if your systems are built on the most reliable platforms, outages will happen. The good news is that with a clear understanding of your critical systems, RTO, and RPO, you can design a resilience strategy that keeps your business running—no matter who’s having a bad day in the cloud.

At LGIT Solutions, we help small businesses map their critical systems, define practical recovery objectives, and implement architectures that align with their goals.

If the AWS outage left you wondering how resilient your business really is, now is the perfect time to find out.

Talk to LGIT Solutions about assessing your RTO and RPO today. Let’s make sure your business stays up when the internet goes down! Call us or use the form below to reach out.