It was early on October 20 2025, when many businesses woke up to a digital blackout. At around 3:11 a.m ET, Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US‑EAST‑1 Region”
The root cause? A latent defect within the service’s automated DNS management system AWS later disclosed.
The result: platforms including Snapchat, Fortnite, Ring and others went offline. For companies who placed their entire infrastructure into the cloud, it was a vivid reminder: relying on someone else’s infrastructure means you’re only as resilient as they are.
What Does This Outage Reveal About Centralized Infrastructure Risks?
Because AWS holds an estimated 30 % of the cloud infrastruture market, a failure in one of its major hubs impacted the broader internet.
“The internet was designed to be resilient; many other channels existed for routing around problems … but we’ve lost some of that resilience by becoming so dependent on a handful of giant tech companies.”
Centralization introduces single‑points of failure: when a vital subsystem like DNS or load‑balancing fails, the ripple effect can cross industries and geographies.
Key takeaway: When your services run on a provider’s platform, your fate is tied to their architecture, control plane, and incident response, no matter how well you’ve configured your apps.
How Can Redundancy Fail Even in Systems Designed for Scale?
The AWS issue began with DNS resolution failures in US‑EAST‑1, even though AWS has multiple Availability Zones.
Redundancy doesn’t always mean independence: many architectures still share critical backend dependencies
Systems scaled for hardware redundancy can still fail because of control‑plane or software logic issues, which often aren’t visible from the outside.
What to ask yourself:
- Does my infrastructure truly provide independent failure domains?
- Am I relying on a single provider’s automation, even across multiple regions?
- In a provider failure, can I redirect routing or infrastructure without waiting for their restore?
What Does This Outage Reveal About Centralized Infrastructure Risks?
The October 2025 AWS outage underscores a critical truth: centralization comes with inherent vulnerabilities. When a single provider controls a significant portion of global infrastructure, even a localized failure can ripple across industries, geographies, and services.
Centralized systems introduce single points of failure. In this case, a latent DNS issue in one AWS region affected applications ranging from social platforms like Snapchat to gaming networks like Fortnite. Even companies that followed best practices for scaling and redundancy couldn’t escape the impact because their fate was tied to AWS’s architecture, control plane, and incident response.
Key takeaways for businesses:
- Relying entirely on one provider amplifies risk.
- Critical infrastructure components, like DNS and load balancing, can propagate failure widely if centralized.
- True resilience requires visibility, control, and independent failure domains beyond a single provider.
How Does Bare‑Metal Infrastructure Compare to Cloud in Terms of Reliability?
Migrating parts of your stack to dedicated servers and colocation gives you tangible shifts in control and reliability:
Advantages of Bare‑Metal & Colocation:
- Your hardware isn’t shared; you know exactly what you’re running.
- You select the data‑center, the transit providers, and you can monitor performance from the metal up.
- Peering, routing, and multi‑homing can be architected by you—not by a single provider’s service model.
- You’re less exposed to automation or control‑plane failures in one cloud environment.
| Metric | Cloud Infrastructure | Bare-Metal + Colocation |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility into routing & hardware | Limited | Full transparency |
| Dependence on one vendor’s ecosystem | High | Reduced (you choose) |
| Failure domain control | Provider defined | Operator defined |
| Performance predictability | Variable | High when optimized |
What Are the Hidden Costs of Downtime for SaaS Companies, ISPs, and Enterprises?
When major outages occur, the visible damage is only part of the story:
- Lost revenue from service interruptions (e.g., failed payments, lost subscriptions).
- Long‑tail operational costs: support tickets spike, user trust drops, sales pipelines stagnate.
- Compliance or SLA penalties if uptime requirements are missed, especially in regulated industries.
- Brand damage that may persist beyond immediate recovery.
In practice: For ISPs and hosting providers, latency or routing issues can feel like downtime, users may not see an error screen, but they feel the lag, the jitter, the frustration. These degrade trust and retention.
How Does Bare-Metal Infrastructure Compare to Cloud in Terms of Reliability?
Bare-metal servers and colocation provide a fundamentally different model of reliability than cloud infrastructure. Rather than relying on a provider’s automated systems and multi-tenant environments, you gain complete control over hardware, networking, and operational logic.
Advantages include:
- Predictable Performance: Dedicated resources eliminate noisy neighbors and variability inherent in shared cloud environments.
- Full Transparency: You can monitor hardware, routing, and latency from the ground up.
- Control Over Failure Domains: Architect redundancy, multi-homing, and peering exactly how you want, rather than relying on a provider’s choices.
- Reduced Risk from Automation Failures: Since you control the hardware and network stack, outages caused by control-plane software or automation logic are less likely to cascade.
In short, bare-metal infrastructure doesn’t remove the need for planning, but it gives operators the visibility, control, and independence necessary to build systems that truly withstand failures.
Transitioning from Cloud to Dedicated Infrastructure
Moving some workloads from the cloud to bare-metal servers or colocation doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Companies can approach the transition in structured steps:
- Assess Workloads: Identify mission-critical applications where uptime, latency, and control are paramount.
- Select the Right Facility: Choose carrier-neutral colocation data centers with access to multiple transit providers.
- Deploy Dedicated Hardware: Provision servers optimized for your applications, ensuring full visibility into performance.
- Implement Hybrid Strategies: Maintain cloud resources for flexibility and scaling, while running critical services on dedicated infrastructure.
- Test Failover and Redundancy: Ensure routing, load balancing, and failover processes work independently of any single provider.
By migrating incrementally and planning carefully, businesses can reduce cloud dependency while maintaining flexibility and performance.
How Can Service Providers Like Shift Hosting Lead This Transition Toward Independence?
At Shift Hosting, we believe infrastructure shouldn’t require blind faith in a single provider. Here’s how we help:
- We deploy dedicated servers and colocation in carrier‑neutral facilities, giving you direct access to transit and peering.
- Our IP transit backbone is engineered for low latency, smart routing, and performance visibility.
- We assist ISPs, data centres, and enterprises with structured transition plans: migrate compute to dedicated hardware, maintain cloud for flexibility, and ensure your networking is optimized for both.
What the AWS Outage Taught Us
The October 2025 AWS outage may go down as a major event, but its lesson is simple: infrastructure resiliency isn’t about putting everything in the cloud. It’s about designing for failure, visibility, and control.
Dedicated hardware, colocation, and optimized IP transit aren’t just optional, they’re strategic. For service providers who build their stacks this way, the next outage won’t be a stop‑sign, it’ll be a checkpoint and it might even put them ahead of their competitors.
If you’re ready to re‑examine your infrastructure, routing strategy, or transit backbone, we’re here to help.
Contact us: sales@shifthosting.com
