When the AWS outage struck Monday morning October 21st, 2025, it was then that we realized just how many businesses, websites, platforms, and apps are dependent on this single cloud platform (about 2,500 to be precise).
Ring doorbell cameras stopped working. Popular games like Fortnite and Roblox froze. My mom’s Peloton app, which she connects to on her Peloton bike, would not load content. Even crypto apps like Coinbase blacked out.
Sure, there was frustration everywhere. It’s definitely not the way you’d want to kickstart the week when there’s so much work to be done.
Thankfully, the AWS outage didn’t last long and luckily, it wasn’t due to a cybersecurity breach–it was only down to a DNS error.
However, this single AWS outage, as rare as it may seem, reveals a bigger problem of our digital technology-heavy era.
Most global workplaces use one of the three big, trusted cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft, and Google. This has the potential to expose us to risk, where a single glitch can stall routine work activity, business operations, and everyday life in general, former FBI counter-terrorism and counterintelligence operative Eric O’Neill told me in our interview today.
What Does The AWS Outage Mean For Leaders And Workers?
If the AWS outage was any longer than it was, massive fortunes could have been at stake and millions, if not billions, of dollars lost. In our chat about the AWS outage, O’Neill talked about organizational vulnerability, and what leaders and everyday non-tech professionals can and should do to safeguard themselves and their careers. We covered business and leadership resilience, the high-paying cybersecurity certifications worth pursuing, and cybersecurity best practices.
Here’s part of the interview below, lightly edited for readability and clarity:
What steps can business leaders take to mitigate against potential risks (like the AWS outage) severely impacting their operations?
O’Neill:
What I suggest is we will need to build a lot more internal resiliency, but we are going to have to continue to rely on the big three cloud services and to an added extension, others that are not quite so giant.
It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month. What are three things that leaders as well as professionals at every level can do to safeguard their organizations?
O’Neill:
1. Practice Good Internet Hygiene
You need to make sure your employees are aware of all of the different ways that attackers are trying to scam and deceive them into opening the door to your data. Most attacks are not a computer that is used to somehow scan a network and brute force their way into another computer. Most attacks happen through social engineering of an employee. So your computer architecture needs to be able to capture that, which means that you’re paying attention, your employees are paying attention, and they’re being vigilant.
2. Build Cyber Defence Capabilities
O’Neill explained that modern cybersecurity goes beyond just defending, and is now about detecting and hunting attacks in progress.
“Cybersecurity is moving to, this hunting, rather than kind of a defensive posture, seeing the attack as it happens, assuming the attack will land and then quickly stopping it and then encapsulating it and finding out what damage was done and how you can quickly right that damage,” he explained. “And we call that resilience: training your staff, and having a good plan for your cybersecurity and what happens if there is an attack.”
3. Conduct Regular Cybersecurity Risk Assessments
“An assessment should happen anytime there is a change to your technology,” O’Neill advises. “Now that could be a key person who suddenly has access, right? That could be a vendor that is now connected to your technology. So you need to make sure that you haven’t opened the door to an external attack through a company that isn’t as strong as you are in cyber. Try this at least every six months.”
Right now, cybersecurity certifications are high in demand. The BLS projects that cybersecurity roles will continue to surge by as much as 29% over the next nine years, which is a crazy figure when you think about how that’s significantly higher than the average job growth rate.
So I asked O’Neill,
What’s your take on that?
O’Neill:
“The reason that cyber security is one of the fastest growing businesses on earth is because the fastest growing business on earth right now is cybercrime scam. The cost of cybercrime moving through the dark web will reach $14 trillion this year, which is extraordinary. And that means that each and every one of us has to take responsibility for our own security, which is why you see such a need for individuals who are adept and trained in cybersecurity.”
O’Neill proceeded to say that these skills are currently in high demand by employers, and are very useful for freelancers to monetize too, as independent consultants:
- Ethical hacking
- Resilience and risk management/mitigation
- Spy hunting (the ability to look in a data set and see the anomalies and determine that, yes, there’s a breach).
7 Certifications To Learn These Skills In 2026
Here are some certifications to help you build these in-demand cybersecurity skills:
- GIAC Security Essentials (GSEC)
- GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst Certification (GCIA)
- GIAC Cloud Penetration Tester (GCPN)
- CISSP – Certified Information Systems Security Professional
- ISSAP – Information Systems Security Architecture Professional
- CompTIA PenTest+
- Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certification
The AWS temporary outage this week should be a wake-up call for workers and leaders everywhere: the very systems that you rely on for daily business operations are liable and can expose you to risk (financial or otherwise). So, it’s time to upskill, build a strategy and culture of resilience, and treat cybersecurity as a personal challenge, whether you work in tech or not.
