Today’s widespread outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which disrupted hundreds of major websites and applications, including Perplexity, Slack, Snapchat, and Fortnite, exposed a vulnerability in cloud infrastructure.
AWS controls nearly 30% of the global cloud market, with its US-EAST-1 region acting as a major hub. The outage was traced to a DNS resolution issue affecting the DynamoDB API endpoint within the US-EAST-1 region, which is home to some of the largest data centres supporting a significant portion of global internet traffic.
We asked industry experts to comment on the issue. Here’s what they told us!
Impact on fintech and SaaS startups
The domino effect of the outage was felt acutely in fintech and SaaS sectors, where milliseconds of downtime translate directly into lost revenue and consumer trust.
Edvards Margevics, Co-CEO of payments company CONCRYT, a startup that facilitates access to B2B banking transfers, emphasises the direct impact on real-time payment processing platforms: “The widespread AWS outage today is a sharp reminder that even the most robust cloud infrastructures can become a single point of failure, and for merchants and payments providers, the consequences are immediate and significant.”
He adds, “In the payments world, where every second counts and interruptions equate to lost revenue or reputational damage, this incident underscores the importance of having resilience, backup protocols and multi-cloud redundancy baked into infrastructure planning.”
Monica Eaton, CEO of Chargebacks911, an original chargeback management company, warns of an imminent spike in payment disputes fueled by failed transactions and duplicate charges: “Outages like this cause frustrated users, but also triggers a domino effect across payment flows. Failed authorisations, duplicate charges, broken confirmation pages, all of that fuels a wave of disputes that merchants will be cleaning up for weeks. And once a customer files a dispute, you are already on the back foot.”
The outage event also highlights the risks faced by financial platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase, which reported slowdowns and restricted access during the outage. Such disruptions reinforce that as startups scale, reliance on AWS or similar providers grows, making infrastructure risk a critical consideration for funding decisions.
Increasing oversight and market implications
Regulatory bodies worldwide are sharpening their focus on risks posed by hyperscale cloud concentration. TechMarketView’s Simon Baxter says, “While the issue is already being resolved, with many of the affected apps back up and running, imagine a more disruptive scenario, driven through cyber-attacks or the actions of malicious foreign powers.
Calls for more resilience and sovereign infrastructure continue to grow, but will we ever be able to truly mitigate the reliance we now place on the likes of Microsoft and AWS? I am not so sure.”
Kashif Nazir, Senior Technical Architect at Cloudhouse, a company that specialises in seamless migration and modernisation of legacy Windows applications, notes, “According to AWS, the disruption is presumed to be caused by a DNS resolution issue affecting the DynamoDB API endpoint in that region. The impact went far beyond the tech world, disrupting major UK banks and government systems. It’s clear that cloud reliability is now a matter of public and economic resilience, not just IT uptime.”
Marijus Briedis, Chief Technology Officer at NordVPN, concludes: “Outages like this highlight a serious issue with how some of the world’s biggest companies often rely on the same digital infrastructure, meaning that when one domino falls, they all do.”
Today’s AWS outage is a wake-up call: the internet’s foundation, propped up largely by a few cloud giants, remains vulnerable. As cloud dependence grows, so too must the resilience investments and regulatory frameworks that safeguard this vital infrastructure.
