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In October 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage which affected more than 16 million users across 60 countries, disrupting over 2,000 services. Some analysts have estimated the incident caused billions of dollars in economic damage, with its impacts being felt in areas as niche as making smart mattresses malfunction.
Amazon later attributed the incident to an issue in its US-East-1 (N. Virginia) region that was “triggered by a latent defect” in DynamoDB’s Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is often described as "the Internet’s phonebook," connecting browsers to the correct servers when users load a website.
Now, Amazon Web Services is rolling out a new business-continuity feature designed to provide a 60-minute recovery time objective (RTO) for Domain Name System (DNS) service disruptions in its US East-1 region. The cloud giant splits its US footprint across six regions, with US-East-1 historically being the most outage-prone, with America's East Coast being one of the top internet users worldwide and the high density of data centres located in the region.
Amazon says the new continuity feature, part of its Amazon Route 53 DNS management tool, will ensure customers “can continue making DNS changes and provisioning infrastructure even during regional outages.” It says the tool is intended to benefit “mission critical applications,” particularly in sectors like banking, FinTech, and SaaS, and will enable users to "allowing them to quickly provision standby cloud resources or redirect traffic when needed."
The feature doesn't come enabled automatically. Amazon Route 53 users will need to log into the AWS Management Console and manually enable Accelerated Recovery after heading to the Hosted Zones section.
The operational stability of US East has long been a known issue for AWS, well before October's IT meltdown. In 2024, an AWS spokesperson told The Register, who covered the update, that the region was understood as a potential weak link due to the vast scale of its operations.