The Wake-Up Name We All Felt
On October 20, 2025, organizations throughout industries, from banking to streaming, logistics to healthcare, skilled widespread service degradation when AWS’s US-EAST-1 area suffered a big outage. Because the ThousandEyes evaluation revealed, the disruption stemmed from failures inside AWS’s inner networking and DNS decision techniques that rippled via dependent companies worldwide.
The foundation trigger, a latent race situation in DynamoDB’s DNS administration system, triggered cascading failures all through interconnected cloud companies. However right here’s what separated groups that might reply successfully from these flying blind: actionable, multilayer visibility.
When the outage started at 6:49 a.m. UTC, subtle monitoring instantly revealed 292 affected interfaces throughout Amazon’s community, pinpointing Ashburn, Virginia because the epicenter. Extra critically, as circumstances developed, from preliminary packet loss to application-layer timeouts to HTTP 503 errors, complete visibility distinguished between community points and software issues. Whereas floor metrics confirmed packet loss clearing by 7:55 a.m. UTC, deeper visibility revealed a unique story: edge techniques had been alive however overwhelmed. ThousandEyes brokers throughout 40 vantage factors confirmed 480 Slack servers affected with timeouts and 5XX codes, but packet loss and latency remained regular, proving this was an software subject, not a community downside.
Determine 1. Altering nature of signs impacting app.slack.com in the course of the AWS outage
Endpoint knowledge revealed app.slack.com expertise scores of simply 45% with 13-second redirects, whereas native community high quality remained excellent at 100%. With out this multilayer perception, groups would waste treasured incident time investigating the improper layer of the stack.
Determine 2. app.slack.com noticed for an finish consumer
The restoration part highlighted why complete visibility issues past preliminary detection. Even after AWS restored DNS performance round 9:05 a.m. UTC, the outage continued for hours as cascading failures rippled via dependent techniques, EC2 couldn’t preserve state, inflicting new server launches to fail for 11 extra hours, whereas companies like Redshift waited to get well and clear huge backlogs.
Understanding this cascading sample prevented groups from repeatedly making an attempt the identical fixes, as an alternative recognizing they had been in a restoration part the place every dependent system wanted time to stabilize. This outage demonstrated three essential classes: single factors of failure conceal in even probably the most redundant architectures (DNS, BGP), preliminary issues create long-tail impacts that persist after the primary repair, and most significantly, multilayer visibility is nonnegotiable.
In right this moment’s conflict rooms, the query isn’t whether or not you may have monitoring, it’s whether or not your visibility is complete sufficient to shortly reply the place the issue is happening (community, software, or endpoint), what the scope of impression is, why it’s taking place (root trigger vs. signs), and whether or not circumstances are bettering or degrading. Floor-level monitoring tells you one thing is improper. Solely deep, actionable visibility tells you what to do about it.
The occasion was a stark reminder of how interconnected and interdependent fashionable digital ecosystems have turn out to be. Purposes right this moment are powered by a dense internet of microservices, APIs, databases, and management planes, lots of which run atop the identical cloud infrastructure. What seems as a single service outage typically masks a much more intricate failure of interdependent parts, revealing how invisible dependencies can shortly flip native disruptions into world impression.
Seeing What Issues: Assurance because the New Belief Cloth
At Cisco, we view Assurance because the connective tissue of digital resilience, working in live performance with Observability and Safety to provide organizations the perception, context, and confidence to function at machine pace. Assurance transforms knowledge into understanding, bridging what’s noticed with what’s trusted throughout each area, owned and unowned. This “belief cloth” connects networks, clouds, and purposes right into a coherent image of well being, efficiency, and interdependency.
Visibility alone is now not adequate. Immediately’s distributed architectures generate a large quantity of telemetry, community knowledge, logs, traces, and occasions, however with out correlation and context, that knowledge provides noise as an alternative of readability. Assurance is what interprets complexity into confidence by connecting each sign throughout layers right into a single operational reality.
Throughout incidents just like the October 20th outage, platforms comparable to Cisco ThousandEyes play a pivotal function by offering real-time, exterior visibility into how cloud companies are behaving and the way customers are affected. As a substitute of ready for standing updates or piecing collectively logs, organizations can immediately observe the place failures happen and what their real-world impression is.
Key capabilities that allow this embody:
- International vantage level monitoring: Cisco ThousandEyes detects efficiency and reachability points from the surface in, revealing whether or not degradation stems out of your community, your supplier, or someplace in between.
- Community path visualization: It pinpoints the place packets drop, the place latency spikes, and whether or not routing anomalies originate in transit or inside the cloud supplier’s boundary.
- Software-layer synthetics: By testing APIs, SaaS purposes, and DNS endpoints, groups can quantify consumer impression even when core techniques seem “up.”
- Cloud dependency and topology mapping: Cisco ThousandEyes exposes the hidden service relationships that always go unnoticed till they fail.
- Historic replay and forensics: After the occasion, groups can analyze precisely when, the place, and the way degradation unfolded, reworking chaos into actionable perception for structure and course of enhancements.
When built-in throughout networking, observability, and AI operations, Assurance turns into an orchestration layer. It permits groups to mannequin interdependencies, validate automations, and coordinate remediation throughout a number of domains, from the information middle to the cloud edge.
Collectively, these capabilities flip visibility into confidence, serving to organizations isolate root causes, talk clearly, and restore service quicker.
Methods to Put together for the Subsequent “Inevitable” Outage
If the previous few years have proven something, it’s that large-scale cloud disruptions will not be uncommon; they’re an operational certainty. The distinction between chaos and management lies in preparation, and in having the appropriate visibility and administration basis earlier than disaster strikes.
Listed here are a number of sensible steps each enterprise can take now:
- Map each dependency, particularly the hidden ones.
Catalogue not solely your direct cloud companies but in addition the management airplane techniques (DNS, IAM, container registries, monitoring APIs) they depend on. This helps expose “shared fates” throughout workloads that seem impartial. - Take a look at your failover logic beneath stress.
Tabletop and reside simulation workouts typically reveal that failovers don’t behave as cleanly as meant. Validate synchronization, session persistence, and DNS propagation in managed circumstances earlier than actual crises hit. - Instrument from the surface in.
Inside telemetry and supplier dashboards inform solely a part of the story. Exterior, internet-scale monitoring ensures you understand how your companies seem to actual customers throughout geographies and ISPs. - Design for swish degradation, not perfection.
True resilience is about sustaining partial service reasonably than going darkish. Construct purposes that may quickly shed non-critical options whereas preserving core transactions. - Combine assurance into incident responses.
Make exterior visibility platforms a part of your playbook from the primary alert to closing restoration validation. This eliminates guesswork and accelerates govt communication throughout crises. - Revisit your governance and funding assumptions.
Use incidents like this one to quantify your publicity: what number of workloads depend upon a single supplier area? What’s the potential income impression of a disruption? Then use these findings to tell spending on assurance, observability, and redundancy.
The purpose isn’t to eradicate complexity; it’s to simplify it. Assurance platforms assist groups constantly validate architectures, monitor dynamic dependencies, and make assured, data-driven selections amid uncertainty.
Resilience at Machine Velocity
The AWS outage underscored that our digital world now operates at machine pace, however belief should maintain tempo. With out the flexibility to validate what’s really taking place throughout clouds and networks, automation can act blindly, worsening the impression of an already fragile occasion.
That’s why the Cisco method to Assurance as a belief cloth pairs machine pace with machine belief, empowering organizations to detect, resolve, and act with confidence. By making complexity observable and actionable, Assurance permits groups to automate safely, get well intelligently, and adapt constantly.
Outages will proceed to occur. However with the appropriate visibility, intelligence, and assurance capabilities in place, their penalties don’t should outline your enterprise.
Let’s construct digital operations that aren’t solely quick, however trusted, clear, and prepared for no matter comes subsequent.
