The massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage won’t be the last, a leading tech expert has warned while urging a shift from "reactive firefighting" to proactive prevention.
The outage, which began around 3 a.m. ET Oct. 20, disrupted a huge portion of the internet and caused widespread interruptions to websites and apps.
The incident, traced back to DNS resolution problems within a core AWS service, affected major platforms including Snapchat, Fortnite, Canva, Coinbase, and Robinhood.
By late Monday afternoon, AWS confirmed in a statement that services had been restored, attributing the root cause to internal subsystem monitoring on network load balancers.
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Bob Wambach, Vice President of Product Portfolio at Dynatrace, told FOX Business the outage highlights an industry-wide challenge.
"It’s about moving from reactive firefighting to proactive prevention," he said. "Too many teams still rely on manual war rooms and guesswork during an incident."
Wambach explained that digital ecosystems are becoming increasingly complex, spanning hybrid and multi-cloud environments, APIs, microservices, and AI-driven workloads, all of which introduce potential points of failure.
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"Modern IT environments are so interconnected that even small disruptions can cascade into massive outages," he said.
"This isn’t about companies being careless, but about the sheer complexity of today’s systems."
For Wambach, other outages like this one could end up lasting much longer.
"The worst-case scenario is a systemic outage lasting hours or even days," he warned.
"When critical services like payments, logistics, or healthcare are affected simultaneously, recovery can be slow and costly and impacts can quickly escalate into operational and regulatory crises."
According to Wambach, traditional monitoring tools can no longer keep pace with this level of complexity.
"IT teams manage millions of dependencies across distributed systems," he said. "Each change or API call can trigger ripple effects, and traditional tools can’t always explain why something broke or what it’s affecting downstream."
Dynatrace, Wambach’s company, leverages AI and topology-aware data to automatically detect anomalies, identify root causes in real time, and even trigger automated fixes.
"Observability gives organizations a causal map of their digital ecosystem," he said. "It allows teams to pinpoint vulnerabilities before they cause downtime and reduce repair time from hours to minutes."
"Everyone suffers when major outages happen. Consumers lose trust instantly, and companies lose revenue, reputation, and loyalty with every passing minute," he said.
"Over time, the gap will widen between companies that embrace AI-driven observability and those that don’t. The former will be resilient, the latter will remain vulnerable," he concluded.
FOX Business has reached out to AWS for comment.
