A massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage temporarily disrupted major companies including airlines, Coinbase, Robinhood, Zoom, and Ring, affecting over 6.5 million users worldwide. Tech expert Shelly Palmer, CEO of The Palmer Group and Professor at Syracuse University, joins CNN International to explain what went wrong, why it happened, and what it reveals about the fragility of cloud infrastructure.
Palmer breaks down how a DNS (Domain Name System) failure—essentially the internet’s “phone book”—caused widespread connectivity issues, while reassuring viewers that no data was lost and this was not a cyberattack.
This segment explores how dependent businesses have become on AWS, what “propagation” means in restoring service, and why this event should serve as a wake-up call for cloud security, redundancy, and resilience.
If you rely on the cloud, this is a must-watch for understanding how a simple glitch can expose massive vulnerabilities—and what companies can do to prevent the next big outage.
Original Airdate: October 20, 2025
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.