When Public Cloud Stumbles: Lessons from the AWS Outage and What They Mean for Healthcare

On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major disruption in its US-EAST-1 region, causing widespread issues across the internet. Prominent names like Delta Airlines, United Airlines, Adobe, Snapchat, Coinbase, and ChatGPT reported downtime or severe slowdowns.

What didn’t make the headlines, however, were the many healthcare software providers who also experienced system degradation and connectivity delays. Their applications, often powering clinical functions, imaging systems, and patient care tools, quietly absorbed the same cloud instability that impacted global brands. While the public focus centered on airlines and social platforms, the event served as an important reminder for the healthcare community: you don’t have to be in the news to feel the effects of a cloud outage.

In moments of widespread disruption, hyperscale cloud providers prioritize restoring the largest or most visible global services first. Healthcare workloads may not make the evening news, but the impact of degraded performance in a clinical environment can be far more consequential.

What Happened

AWS traced the issue to a failure in one of its network load-balancer subsystems, a foundational part of its cloud infrastructure. The failure didn’t cause an immediate shutdown but led to significant degradation across multiple services. Systems remained online, but latency spiked, transactions failed, and services became unreliable.

For healthcare, that distinction between degradation and outage matters. A few seconds of delay in a clinical workflow, a frozen login screen during admissions, or a failed data sync between systems can disrupt care just as much as a complete downtime event.

What Healthcare Organizations Can Take Away

This incident wasn’t just about infrastructure; it was about how technology partners plan for, respond to, and communicate during unexpected events. That distinction is critical for healthcare, where reliability directly affects care delivery.

Evaluate Partners Beyond Their Infrastructure

The technology stack matters, but what truly defines resilience is how your partner manages it. Ask providers how they monitor, isolate, and respond when services degrade, not just when they fail.

The best partners understand that healthcare operations can’t simply “pause” until a cloud issue is resolved.

Expect Crisis Response, Not Just Uptime

When disruption occurs, timing and communication are everything. Healthcare organizations should look for partners who:

• Communicate early, even before the full cause is known.
• Provide updates in plain language, linking technical issues to operational impacts.
• Prioritize healthcare workflows, ensuring that recovery efforts align with patient-care needs.

These behaviors reflect a culture of accountability and awareness built for healthcare, not just IT.

Define Service Agreements Around Healthcare Outcomes

Generic cloud SLAs measure uptime. In healthcare, that’s only one piece of the picture. Effective agreements should also define:

• Recovery objectives that reflect patient-impact risk.
• Communication timelines during degradation or outage events.
• 24×7 response protocols built around clinical urgency.

SLAs written with healthcare in mind ensure that when systems slow or fail, the response mirrors the seriousness of the environment they support.

Choose Partners with Healthcare Domain Experience

The most advanced technology still depends on the people and processes behind it. Vendors who understand healthcare and the human cost of disruption build and communicate differently.

That domain experience often translates into faster awareness, clearer updates, and more meaningful responses during cloud-wide issues.

The Takeaway

The October 20 AWS outage showed that even the strongest platforms can experience degradation that feels like downtime. For healthcare, the lesson isn’t about avoiding the public cloud; it’s about choosing technology partners who understand both the technical and clinical stakes when things don’t go as planned.

Because when the next disruption happens, and it will,  the organizations best prepared will be those who selected partners that combine strong technology with a true healthcare focus, ensuring continuity, communication, and confidence when the public cloud stumbles.

Mike Donahue
Chief Operating Officer, CloudWave