When DNS Goes Down, Civilisation's Collapse Plays Out in Your Suburban Flat
All right, folks, buckle in. It's time for a rant because the planet just got schooled yet again in why we've put all our digital eggs in one totally cracked basket.
Last Monday rolls around and poof, the US-EAST-1 region of AWS, the single point of failure practically built for drama, has a DNS hiccup and half the world's internet decides it's nap time.
Snapchat, Venmo, even the app that tells you if your cat's using the loo, all snuffed out like a dodgy pub candle.
The Poetic Irony of Digital Dependence
The October 20, 2025 outage started around 3 a.m. ET when Amazon Web Services experienced a DNS resolution failure in the US-EAST-1 region that impacted DynamoDB availability. You'd think after weathering our share of technical storms, we wouldn't allow one misbehaving DNS server in Virginia to freeze Zoom calls in Tokyo or turn your smart gadgetry into particularly expensive paperweights.
Why does a digital sneeze in Ashburn take out customer payments in Edinburgh?
Exactly.
Speaking of gadgets, I was hill-walking near Loch Lomond just last month. Lovely spot, bit foggy as usual. When suddenly my navigation app just sits there, spinning. And I'm left with my fancy torch, sorry, smart torch, and the thing only flashes "connecting" all night.
Had to navigate by actual moss on the rocks. I mean, I should get a medal, but honestly, my professional dignity died in a ditch right next to my Wi-Fi signal.
The Theatre of the Absurd: When Beds Betray You
Some Eight Sleep mattress users experienced beds stuck upright and haywire temperatures during the AWS outage, with reports of smart beds getting locked at nine degrees above room temperature. This particular outage exposed our collective worship of cloud-powered, smart everything.
Beds stuck roasting their owners. Bulbs sulking in darkness. Automated litter boxes refusing to tattle on the cat.
Truly, civilisation's collapse played out in a suburban flat.
The Eight Sleep mattress really gets me. A bed that costs more per month than my council tax and, apparently, sweats you like a sauna when its cloud app goes kaput. The Litter-Robot litter box was affected as well, with owners unable to monitor their cat's bathroom habits. My friend's wee ginger cat's bowel history lost to the DNS void.
I honestly never thought I'd see the day cleaning the cat's toilet would be a network event.
The 1990s Technology We Can't Seem to Chuck
Here's what strikes me: every single time, DNS. This is 1990s gear. Loads of us flagged ages ago that DNS was the weak link.
Everyone yawned, patched over it, and now here we are, all proud of shoving every function into the cloud, still relying on DNS like it's a family heirloom nobody dares chuck.
It is almost magnificent. We put satellites in space, AI in our phones, but still let DNS be the single rickety bridge we trample over with the entire global economy. It's as if convenience became a narcotic. Why cure the rot in your digital pipes when you can wrap them in gold and call it progress?
We tinker around the edges, bolt on yet another service, and, surprise surprise, no one wants to be the boring soul that fixes technical debt because it doesn't come with a bonus or a flashy conference talk.
So we keep patching, and DNS keeps dangling us over the abyss, year after year.
The Financial Reality for UK SMBs
In the UK, customers of banks including Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax reported issues while attempting to log into their accounts. It's easy to think this is distant and technical, but finance, gaming and even hairdresser appointments couldn't process payments.
Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, Roblox, you name it, millions lost in hours. Injuries to reputation. Let's be honest, the only thing sinking faster than service levels is the CFO's spirits looking at the invoice.
Or the poor chap standing outside the closed salon gutted that AWS ate their haircut.
It's funny. If a single line on a risk register actually meant everyone took resilience seriously, we'd be in a different world altogether.
The Human Cost: Sysadmins as Therapists
You've got to feel for the sysadmins after this. Memes aside, the subreddits quickly turned into group therapy.
"Drive home with the radio off," they said. Maybe the most British description of exhausted despair I've seen all year.
And yet they'll never truly clock out. Even the ones fantasising about using the company card on, let's say, recreational therapy or going full Bond and hot-wiring a car to disappear.
For many, there's no off switch for the responsibility.
We joke about sysadmin therapists earning NHS wages, but maybe we're not that far off. The tech world's churning out more burned-out support staff than ever.
Something's got to give before all our resilience is memes and sleepless nights.
The "Smart" Device Stupidity
You buy a high-tech bed that only works when the weather's fair in AWS land. Meanwhile, a normal bed? Always operational. Never needs a firmware update.
Businesses build fantastic web forms and services, but forget redundancy or any offline mode. So when DNS goes, their customers are staring at spinning wheels and "try again later" pop-ups.
Reminds me, my prized vinyl record collection sits right here. Not one byte of cloud required. No internet, no problem. Beethoven and Bowie are always available.
Maybe, just maybe, there's wisdom in old tech after all. If only some of those SME payment systems were as robust as a turntable.
The Uncomfortable Pattern: Three Strikes and Still Not Out
This is the third major outage in five years tied to the AWS US-EAST-1 data cluster, which powers much of the internet's traffic. Let's face it, this isn't even new. That same AWS region, US-EAST-1, has experienced spectacular failure three times in just five years.
And yet, everyone still clings to it like it's the last lifeboat on the Titanic, even as the hull's full of holes.
Yep, experts have been calling the network fragile for years. That cloud convenience means for a lot of businesses shrugging and saying, "we'll risk it, probably won't happen again."
Multi-cloud or hybrid? Hard work. But maybe, just maybe, it's a future where you're not down because one postcode in Virginia has the hiccups.
What UK SMBs Need to Do Now
If even your local barber shop's bookings freeze the moment US-EAST-1 sneezes, maybe it's time to seriously rethink how we grow and protect these systems.
Diversity in clouds. It isn't just for the marketing slides, folks.
Far too many companies skip critical backup steps. Cheap up front, sure, but astronomically expensive when, say, a DNS issue shuts your doors for three hours.
If you cut corners, you pay twice. Or more if you're a UK bank trying to process payroll mid-outage.
The Path Forward: Offline Fallback Mode
Maybe we need an offline fallback mode for every essential business function, from beds to banking. If the cloud collapses, at least the lights stay on, the tills ring, and no one sweats through their mattress waiting for a DNS miracle.
Here's the action plan for UK SMBs:
Multi-cloud strategy: Don't put all your eggs in AWS. Distribute across providers.
Offline fallback modes: Critical functions must work without internet.
DNS redundancy: Use multiple DNS providers, not just one.
Regular testing: Actually test your disaster recovery, not just write it down.
Vendor vetting: Ask suppliers about their cloud dependencies.
So is it all doom or can we do better than patching up vintage DNS every time it explodes?
There's hope, at least if we move towards redundancy, decentralisation and stop piling critical tasks on these ancient protocols.
We're overdue a rethink, surely?
Perhaps, just perhaps, it's time to give every smart device a stupid mode fallback switch. When the internet breaks, your bed still keeps you warm and the coffee machine doesn't judge you for DNS outages.
If we're smart about business basics, maybe we survive the next cloud catastrophe, without all becoming sysadmin therapists overnight.
And let's not forget, if you're a small business, resilience isn't just a tech buzzword. Sometimes it's sleeping soundly on a dumb mattress while the world's smart gadgets are sweating through the sheets.
We're not doomed yet, but we need to wise up.
About Mauven MacLeod
Mauven is a former UK Government cyber analyst who now works in cybersecurity consulting. She specialises in the intersection of human behaviour and digital security, helping organisations implement security policies that work with, rather than against, human psychology. Born and raised in Scotland, she brings a no-nonsense approach to technology risk management.