On Monday, October 20th, the world saw how much the modern economy runs on cloud plumbing. An AWS Outage rippled across apps and services that people use to move money and run daily operations. Coinbase, Robinhood, and other crypto services reported disruptions. Venmo and many other consumer apps slowed or stalled. Even large consumer sites and streaming platforms struggled as the outage spread across a core AWS region.
For partners who support merchants, every hour of downtime can mean lost revenue and frustrated customers. This post explains how web services underpin payments and gives a practical playbook to reduce the chance that an AWS Outage stops the flow of funds.
What happened on October 20th
Multiple reports indicate the event centered on the US East 1 region and involved issues with DNS resolution and health monitoring for network load balancers. The impact cascaded across more than one hundred AWS services which in turn affected the many companies that depend on them. Services gradually recovered later in the day.
Financial apps and crypto exchanges were among the most visible disruptions. Coinbase and Robinhood both reported issues. Venmo users experienced problems. Other major platforms across industries also went down or degraded during the AWS Outage.
Industry coverage and analysis framed the day as another reminder that a single cloud region or provider can become a point of failure with real financial cost. Commentators called out the need for better redundancy and multi-cloud or multi-region thinking.
Why a cloud outage hits payments so hard
Modern payments rely on a chain of web services. When a link breaks upstream, the effect can reach the checkout.
- API dependence. Gateways, risk screens, token vaults, and wallet services are API calls over the public internet. If identity, DNS, or routing is impaired, those calls can time out or fail.
- Region concentration. Many providers optimize for cost and latency in US East 1. A regional incident can therefore have an outsized impact.
- Event driven workflows. Queues, streams, and functions power settlements, batch jobs, and webhooks. If services like DynamoDB, SQS, or Lambda slow down, downstream posting or receipt delivery can lag.
- Third-party chain reaction. When an app like Venmo or an exchange like Coinbase is affected, merchants who rely on those rails or funding sources can be affected as well.
Crypto markets provide a clear case study. Despite the goal of decentralization, much of the supporting infrastructure runs on centralized cloud platforms. When a large provider stumbles, access to wallets, exchanges, nodes, or analytics tools can stumble too.
What partners can do right now
The AWS Outage is a prompt to revisit resilience. Here is a practical checklist you can start this week.
1. Reduce single region risk
- Distribute critical workloads across at least two cloud regions with active patterns for auth, payment routing, webhooks, and status pages.
- Treat US East 1 as important but not special. Test full regional failover for apps and data that power checkout and settlement. Industry reports from this event again point to concentration risk in that region.
2. Diversify where it matters
- Consider selective multi cloud for traffic intake and status communications so you can still inform merchants during an AWS Outage.
- Evaluate multi-cloud or multi-provider options for high-impact services like DNS, monitoring, and incident broadcast. Analysis following the outage highlights diversification as a way to limit financial exposure.
3. Build graceful degradation into the point of sale
- Cache catalog, tax tables, and tokenized card references for short offline windows with automatic replay when connectivity returns.
- Enable offline approvals for small checks where allowed by your risk policy, with clear on screen disclosures for merchants.
- Queue receipts, tips, and signature uploads locally when gateways are unreachable, then flush once upstream APIs recover. Real world coverage from October 20 shows that queues and event services can slow, so local buffers are essential.
4. Add routing and redundancy at the payments layer
- Work with your gateway or processor on secondary endpoints in a distinct region and practice cutover.
- For wallets or alternative payments, document a quick disable path so merchants can fall back to core card acceptance during an outage affecting those providers. News from the outage shows that wallets and exchanges can be hit.
5. Strengthen DNS and identity foundations
- Use a provider-independent domain registrar and two DNS providers with health checks.
- Keep separate identity stores or at least emergency break-glass access paths if your main identity provider is within the impacted region. Technical summaries from October 20 called out DNS involvement as an early trigger.
6. Make communication part of the system
- Host your public status page outside your primary cloud.
- Prewrite merchant messages for a cloud incident with plain language and a set of common Q&A.
- Publish realistic ETAs based on your observability, not hearsay. During this event, updates from multiple outlets arrived before some product dashboards, which heightened confusion. 7. Measure the true cost of downtime
- Track lost authorization attempts, abandoned carts, and delayed settlements during the window.
- Review whether your service credits or SLAs meaningfully offset business impact. Business coverage notes that the financial toll of an AWS Outage can be measured in the billions across industries.
8. Run post-incident practice
- Rehearse a four-hour cloud incident. Simulate degraded APIs, high latency, and missing webhooks.
- Verify that support teams can reach the right runbooks and that executive updates reflect real telemetry.
- Confirm that merchants understand their offline options and that partners know how to escalate.
How BOLD supports resilience
Our mission is to keep money moving for merchants through clear design, transparent options, and smart failover planning. We work with partners to document playbooks, set up testing routines, and validate that the essentials keep running during events like the October 20 AWS Outage. If you want help reviewing your architecture or messaging plan, we are here to support you.
Key takeaways for ISOs and ISVs
- Cloud concentration is a business risk, not just an IT risk. Diversify control points where it counts.
- Focus on continuity at checkout and settlement. Cache, queue, and gracefully degrade.
- Treat communication as a product feature. Keep a status channel that does not rely on your primary cloud.
Bibliography
- Reuters. Amazon says AWS cloud service is back to normal after outage disrupts businesses worldwide. October 20, 2025. Reuters
- The Guardian. Amazon says Web Services are recovering after outage hits millions of users. October 20, 2025. The Guardian
- Business Insider. Amazon resolves AWS outage that impacted Reddit, Perplexity, and more. October 20, 2025. Business Insider
- Fortune. Coinbase, Robinhood down as Amazon outage briefly disrupts crypto services. October 20, 2025. Fortune
- TechRadar. Amazon fixes huge AWS outage that broke much of the internet. October 20, 2025. TechRadar
- Bloomberg. AWS Outage: Amazon Cloud Restored. October 20, 2025. Bloomberg
- USA Today via AOL. AWS outage temporarily disrupts websites like Snapchat and Venmo. October 20, 2025. AOL
- Yahoo Finance. Coinbase, Robinhood down as Amazon outage briefly cripples the internet. October 20, 2025. Yahoo Finance
- CryptoSlate. AWS failure exposes crypto centralized weak point. October 20, 2025. CryptoSlate
- Forbes. AWS Outage: Billions Lost, Multi Cloud Is Wall Street’s Solution. October 20, 2025. Forbes
- FinTech Magazine. AWS Outage: A Major Risk For The Financial Sector. October 20, 2025.
