On October 20, 2025, AWS suffered a massive outage that crippled a large portion of the internet, disrupting everything from Snapchat to Canvas—and halting creative workflows across studios and post-production houses. For hours, one of the world’s most trusted platforms struggled to restore 142 affected services.
Why it matters: this was not a minor zone disruption but a whole-region failure in US-EAST-1, taking down everything dependent on spinning up new EC2 instances. For media teams, that meant editors suddenly lost access to projects, render queues froze, and review platforms went silent—leaving entire productions in limbo.
When your production pipeline and recovery systems live under the same roof, a regional outage can quickly escalate into a full-scale shutdown. The root cause: Amazon’s over-reliance on a single region to run global services. In an industry where uptime drives delivery schedules and budgets, centralization amplifies risk.
The risk of a single provider
AWS is engineered for reliability, but even the best systems have choke points. In this case, it appears that a DNS fault in DynamoDB cascaded through dependent services — EC2, ECS, Elastic Beanstalk, and beyond — while users could only watch status dashboards flicker from red to yellow to green.
Hard lesson learned: when you can’t spin up new EC2 VMs, everything else eventually starts breaking — including the media workflows built on top of them. Cloud render nodes stalled, shared storage became inaccessible, and editing platforms dependent on AWS infrastructure went dark.
This outage underscores a simple truth: resilience depends on independence, not geography. Multi-zone replication inside a single provider is not true fault isolation — it is redundancy built on shared dependencies. By contrast, Storj Production Cloud achieves redundancy without replication, distributing data across a global network so files remain accessible even when an entire region goes offline. Built on a globally distributed, uncorrelated architecture, Storj eliminates shared control planes and regional bottlenecks — maintaining workflow continuity even when centralized clouds fail.
When two major outages strike in one week
Just days before the AWS event, a fire in South Korea’s National Information Resources Service destroyed 858 TB of government data — with no backups to restore from.
If the universe is sending a message, it’s loud and clear: resilience can’t rely on a single region, a single provider, or a single architectural pattern.
When the cloud burns: A preventable disaster in South Korea →
Two very different disasters, one common truth: centralization magnifies fragility.
How Storj keeps creative workflows moving
Every organization should follow a 3-2-1-1 data-protection mindset — 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 off-site, and 1 immutable. But the AWS outage proved that resilience can’t live in a secondary backup alone. When your creative pipeline depends on constant access to massive files, there’s now a better way — using object storage as the authoritative source of truth rather than treating it as an afterthought.
That is exactly what Storj Production Cloud delivers — the first distributed cloud designed for media workflows, with performance tiers that make object storage practical as a primary, high-speed media hub. From active production to nearline and archive, Storj tiers remove the old trade-off between accessibility and affordability, allowing creative teams to keep their assets in one globally available, resilient storage layer.
Storj makes that shift simple:
- Distributed by default – Your media isn’t trapped in one provider’s data center. Each object is encrypted, erasure-coded, and distributed across thousands of independent nodes worldwide — ensuring that footage, proxies, and renders remain accessible even when a region fails.
- Immutable and tamper-proof – Object locking and versioning protect your work from ransomware, corruption, or accidental deletion — a safety net baked into the workflow itself.
- Always accessible – Editors can mount Storj Object Storage directly as a drive, maintaining access to active projects without replication lag or region dependencies.
- Fast recovery, everywhere – Parallel retrieval across nodes saturates available bandwidth for faster RTO and RPO, bringing production back online in minutes, not days.
- Affordable resilience – At roughly $6 per TB per month, protecting 100 TB of production assets costs about $600 monthly — a fraction of the cost of idle suites, missed deadlines, or reshoots.
- Uncorrelated architecture – Storj’s globally distributed, uncorrelated design eliminates shared control planes and regional dependencies, ensuring true independence from hyperscaler outages..
Learn more in A recovery plan your future self will thank you for and When 40 Gbps dropped to zero — and nobody noticed
Why this kind of outage does not have to happen again
There’s no need to blame AWS — the lesson is what matters. Every major cloud has had its day in the dark. The question is: are your workflows built to withstand it?
If backup, asset management, and restore systems share the same dependencies or single cloud region as production, that is not resilience — it is redundancy without independence.
Storj provides a truly uncorrelated layer of protection, immune to regional or provider-level failures that can take entire ecosystems offline. Even when a hyperscaler region fails, editors, colorists, and producers can keep working with uninterrupted access to their media.
The future of resilience is hybrid by design — blending the scalability of centralized clouds with the independence of distributed infrastructure. Storj makes that balance practical today.
Learn more
If you are rethinking your disaster-recovery or media continuity strategy, start here:
- Lessons from the CrowdStrike outage and the Irish Potato Famine
- When 40 Gbps dropped to zero — and nobody noticed
- A recovery plan your future self will thank you for
- When the cloud burns: A preventable disaster in South Korea
Protect your production before disaster strikes
Do not wait for your next outage to stop the show.
Join the distributed cloud and start your free trial or schedule a meeting with a Storj solution engineer to see how distributed storage protects creative workflows from the next cloud failure.
Your footage, projects, and creative time are too valuable to depend on one provider.Upload once. Access anywhere. Keep creating.
