Cloud Disruptions and AWS Outages: Lessons for Enterprise Resilience
February 12, 2026
If your organization runs anything meaningful on AWS (and most do), the string of outages over the past year should have triggered some uncomfortable conversations.
Not about whether AWS is reliable. It is, broadly. But about what happens to your operations when a single provider has a bad day.
The pattern worth watching
Cloud outages aren't new. What's changed is the blast radius. As more organizations move critical workloads to a single hyperscaler, a regional disruption in us-east-1 doesn't just slow down a dev environment. It takes down customer-facing applications, internal tools, and sometimes entire business units.
The February 2026 incident affecting several S3-dependent services was a good example. Organizations with hard dependencies on a single region experienced hours of downtime. Those with even basic multi-region failover were back online in minutes.
What this means for mid-market organizations
Enterprise companies have dedicated cloud architecture teams. They build for resilience from day one. But for mid-market organizations, especially those that migrated to the cloud quickly during 2020-2021, the architecture often reflects speed, not resilience.
Common gaps we see:
- Single-region deployments with no failover plan
- Backups stored in the same cloud provider as the primary workload
- No documented recovery procedures for cloud service disruptions
- DNS configurations that don't support rapid failover
Three things to do this month
1. Map your critical-path dependencies. Not everything needs multi-region redundancy. But you need to know which services, if unavailable for 4+ hours, would materially impact revenue or operations. Start there.
2. Test your backups from outside your primary cloud. If your backups live in the same AWS account and region as your production workloads, they're not really backups. They're copies. Pull a backup down to a different environment and verify you can actually restore from it.
3. Document your "cloud is down" playbook. When AWS has an incident, your team shouldn't be Googling what to do. A one-page runbook (who to contact, what to communicate to customers, which manual processes to activate) saves hours of confusion.
The bigger picture
Multi-cloud isn't about running the same workload on AWS and Azure simultaneously. That's expensive and complex. It's about making deliberate choices: critical data replicated to a second provider, DNS that can redirect traffic, and teams that have practiced what to do when the dashboard turns red.
Cloud resilience isn't a technology problem. It's a planning problem. And planning is free.