Are We Too Dependent on Big Tech Clouds? AWS Down on 20-10-2025

On October 20, 2025, a major outage hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) and disrupted hundreds of popular services across the web. Users around the world found Snapchat not loading, Fortnite games freezing, banking apps timing out, and even smart home devices becoming unresponsive. The root cause? A network issue in AWS’s us-east-1 region—one of its busiest—which sent ripple effects across much of the internet.

The incident served as a stark reminder: when a single cloud provider goes down, the fallout can be massive. So it begs the question: have we become too dependent on big tech cloud providers?

How Did We Get Here?

Cloud services from Amazon, Microsoft (Azure), and Google (GCP) power a large chunk of what we rely on every day. They offer tools, storage, processing power, and networking—all hosted in powerful data centers around the globe. Developers and businesses love these platforms because they’re fast, scalable, and take the headache out of managing infrastructure.

But there’s a downside: concentration risk. When so many businesses build on the same foundation, a single point of failure can have global consequences. That’s exactly what happened with AWS’s Oct 20 outage. It wasn’t just websites—food delivery, payments, customer service systems, even government services in the UK were impacted.

The Vendor Lock-In Problem

One reason so many companies stick with a single cloud provider is vendor lock-in. Once you’ve built your systems using proprietary tools from one provider—like AWS Lambda or Google’s BigQuery—it becomes technically and financially challenging to move elsewhere.

To make things more complicated, many providers charge egress fees—fees for moving your data out of their cloud. These fees make it expensive to back up or migrate your data to a competing platform. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) even flagged these practices as harmful to competition, noting that they’re a major barrier for customers seeking alternatives.

Bottom line: the more you invest in a single provider’s ecosystem, the harder it becomes to leave. That’s great for cloud vendors—but risky for the rest of us.

Can Multi-Cloud Help?

A natural solution might seem to be multi-cloud: using two or more cloud providers to spread your risk. That way, if one goes down, you can fail over to the other. This sounds good in theory—but in practice, it’s not always simple.

Each cloud platform has its own tools, standards, and quirks. Running a system across AWS and Azure, for example, can lead to increased complexity, duplicated infrastructure, and higher costs. It also requires engineering teams to be fluent in multiple environments—not always realistic for small companies or solo developers.

That said, multi-cloud is becoming more common. Some companies use one provider as their primary and another for cold backups or disaster recovery. Others design critical components—like DNS, databases, or file storage—to be provider-agnostic. These hybrid approaches allow teams to keep things resilient without doubling their infrastructure.

Real-World Example: Dropbox’s Exit from AWS

One of the most famous examples of reducing cloud dependence comes from Dropbox. Originally hosted entirely on AWS, Dropbox began moving off the cloud in 2015. The project—nicknamed “Magic Pocket”—involved building its own infrastructure to host user data. By 2018, Dropbox had shifted the majority of its storage in-house, keeping only a small portion on AWS.

Why did they do it? Cost, performance, and control. Dropbox’s massive scale made owning infrastructure more efficient long-term. While not every company can do this, it shows that moving away from full cloud dependency is possible—especially for companies with specialized needs and resources.

What Regulators Are Saying

Cloud concentration hasn’t just raised eyebrows in the tech world—it’s caught the attention of regulators, too. In the UK, the CMA published findings showing that AWS and Microsoft control 60–80% of the market, with lock-in effects caused by technical hurdles, long-term discount contracts, and egress fees.

The report suggests these dynamics harm competition and reduce customer choice. There’s growing interest in data portability, interoperability standards, and fairer pricing—which could reshape how cloud services are offered in the years ahead.

A Resilience Playbook for Developers and Small Teams

Even if you’re not running a billion-dollar platform, you can still take steps to reduce your dependency and improve uptime:

1. Deploy across multiple availability zones or regions

Most major clouds let you spread your app across geographically separated data centers. If one zone or region goes down, your app can keep running elsewhere.

2. Keep off-cloud backups

Store periodic snapshots of your databases and files in a separate cloud (e.g. backup AWS data to Google Cloud) or an offline server. This protects you if one provider becomes totally inaccessible.

3. Use third-party DNS and monitoring

Don’t rely on your cloud provider for everything. External DNS and uptime monitoring tools can help you detect issues sooner and reroute traffic if needed.

4. Choose portable services

When possible, use open-source or cross-platform technologies. Avoid deep integration with proprietary tools unless necessary.

5. Budget for failover and drills

Set aside time and money for resilience. Run mock failover scenarios to test your plan before disaster strikes.

Final Thoughts

The cloud isn’t the enemy—it’s one of the greatest enablers of modern software. But like any powerful tool, it comes with trade-offs. Relying too heavily on a single provider introduces risk—whether that’s downtime, lock-in, or cost spikes.

By staying aware, planning for failure, and embracing smart architecture choices, we can enjoy the best of the cloud without being trapped by it. Outages like the one on October 20 are wake-up calls—not to abandon the cloud, but to use it with intention and resilience in mind.