On Monday 20th October, AWS, the biggest cloud provider on the planet – had a wobble that sent shockwaves across the internet. The memes have been great, but the impact... not so great.
Yep, we saw it too. Zoom and HMRC wouldn’t load, banks went quiet, and Snapchat users probably thought the world had ended. Even PagerDuty – the tool used to alert people about outages – all went down.
While the internet pointed fingers at BGP (the backbone routing system of the web), AWS later confirmed it was a DNS issue – the digital phonebook that tells your computer where to find things online. Either way, millions of users got a harsh reminder that even the cloud giants have bad days.
When the cloud has a hiccup...
In the age of the hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) IT becomes faster, scalable, and oftentimes, “someone else’s problem.” But when that someone else trips up, your business can’t send an email, access data, or take payments.
This outage showed how fragile the digital supply chain can be. One misconfigured route or DNS error can blackhole traffic across entire continents. It doesn’t matter how “geo-redundant” you think you are if everything you own points back to one provider.
Redundancy & resilience planning
If Monday gave you flashbacks, it’s probably time to talk strategy. Multi-cloud and hybrid models aren’t just for big enterprises with endless budgets – they’re for anyone who doesn’t fancy explaining to their board why “everything’s down.”
Redundancy isn’t glamorous. Neither is resilience planning. But they’re what keep you online when the giants stumble.
At Intercity, we help businesses design infrastructure that doesn’t put all its eggs in one hyperscaler-shaped basket. Whether that’s spreading workloads across clouds, adding private hosting for critical services, or creating offline continuity plans that actually work – it’s about making sure you can keep moving when others can’t.
Supply chain blind spots
Even if your own systems stayed up, your suppliers might not have. That’s what makes modern IT risk so slippery. You might have rock-solid hosting, but if your legal, banking or logistics partners relied solely on AWS, you’ve still got a problem.
Resilience isn’t just about your own tech stack; it’s also about how your partners and suppliers are mitigating their risks too.
Where do we go from here?
If the outage didn’t hit you this time, great. But if it made you pause for thought, now’s the moment to act:
- Map your dependencies. Know which providers and platforms your critical services rely on – directly and indirectly.
- Diversify. Build redundancy into your hosting, connectivity and DNS setup.
- Plan for offline. Create playbooks for communication and operations when key platforms go dark.
- Test and monitor. Don’t just assume resilience – prove it.
- Talk to your partners. If they go down, so do you.
And if you’re too busy to map dependencies, stress-test suppliers, or design continuity plans, that’s where we come in. Intercity’s experts can assess your cloud reliance, model failure scenarios, and build pragmatic resilience into your infrastructure, without slowing your teams down.
