On October 20, 2025, a single technical issue inside Amazon Web Services took down part of the internet for about 15 hours. Over 1000 companies, including Netflix, Snapchat, Venmo, and thousands of smaller businesses that had never heard of “US-EAST-1” until their apps stopped working. Some estimates put the total financial damage above $100 billion.

At first, this may seem like an unavoidable natural disaster, but it was a part of one cloud provider’s system failing that caused every business that depended on it to suffer. This is the very risk that this article is about. If you’re looking into alternatives to AWS, this kind of event is usually part of the reason, even if it’s not the first thing that comes to mind.

Understanding the single vendor risks

If your business depends completely on one company for something critical, that company’s bad day becomes your bad day too. It doesn’t matter how good or reliable that company usually is. Nobody is immune to outages, price changes, or policy shifts, and when you’ve built everything on top of just one of them, you have no way to soften the blow.

This applies to any vendor, but it’s especially true of cloud providers, because so much of modern business runs through them: the website, the app, customer data, payment processing, internal tools. The list goes on!

When that one provider has a problem, it’s not one part of the business that’s affected. In fact, most of it suffers all at once… which is the last thing your organization should be worrying about.

The outage problem is getting worse

The October 2025 AWS outage was just the beginning. Cloud researchers tracked 38 separate AWS outages across 2025 alone, and AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud together had over 100 outages between August 2024 and August 2025. Another major AWS disruption hit in March 2026, just months after the first one.

Industry analysts now describe cloud outages as something businesses should expect, not something they should be surprised by. That doesn’t mean AWS (or any major provider) is poorly run. It just means that no cloud – no matter how large – is completely immune to failure. So, it’s up to you: does your business have any way to keep running when an outage occurs?

Businesses that had even a partial backup, a second provider handling some workloads, a way to redirect traffic, or an offline fallback were able to stay partly functional during the outages. However, organizations that had everything in one place simply went dark until AWS came back online.

Problems beyond the outages

Outages are the most dramatic examples, but relying on one vendor creates other risks too:

You lose negotiating power: If moving away from your provider would be too painful or expensive, you have little leverage when it comes to pricing or contract terms. Vendors are aware of this, and businesses that can credibly say, “we can just move this workload elsewhere” tend to get better deals.

You inherit their problems: If your provider changes its pricing, updates its policies, or has a regional issue that affects only some of its data centers, you’re stuck with whatever happens, because you don’t have anywhere else to go.

You may run into compliance gaps: Depending on your industry, keeping all your data with a single foreign provider can raise questions about where that data legally sits and who can access it, questions that are easier to answer if at least part of your setup runs with a provider based where you operate.

Solution

Other than having general awareness regarding your choice of platform, here are a few things you can do to ensure your organization’s data safety:

• Keep your most critical systems backed up elsewhere: Even a simple failover for your website or core app can mean the difference between a bad hour and a poor week altogether.
• Split workloads by purpose: Some organizations keep customer-facing apps on a major cloud provider for reliability and scale, while moving cost-sensitive or region-specific workloads to a smaller, affordable provider.
• Test whether moving is actually possible: Before you need to move in an emergency, check how hard it would be. If it’s genuinely daunting, that’s useful information on its own.

Keep in mind that none of this requires a massive migration project. It just needs you to not have every part of your business depend on one company that you have no control over.

Reasonable next steps

You don’t need to solve everything at once. A good starting point is understanding what other providers are actually available to you, what they cost, and how they compare to what you’re using now.

If you want to see what the comparison looks like in practice, we recommend checking out our complete AWS alternatives comparison for India, as it gives you a detailed look at how AWS stacks up against other options based on pricing, support, and reliability.