‘Given their massive global scale and the complexity of these distributed systems, it’s actually remarkable that large-scale disruptions like this are as rare as they are,’ says DataRobot CEO and former AWS executive Debanjan Saha.
Amazon Web Services’ massive outage this week that caused disruptions across popular applications, websites, businesses and Amazon users was “inevitable,” says former AWS vice president and general manager Debanjan Saha.
“Having spent many years working at AWS and Google, I know how much effort goes into designing and operating cloud infrastructure,” said Saha, who is currently the CEO of AI software developer DataRobot.
“Given their massive global scale and the complexity of these distributed systems, it’s actually remarkable that large-scale disruptions like this are as rare as they are,” Saha said in an email to CRN.
[Related: AWS’ 15-Hour Outage: 5 Big AI, DNS, EC2 And Data Center Keys To Know]
AWS’ outage was “inevitable over a long enough horizon,” he said, as both public cloud and private cloud providers will eventually experience an outage.
“The question is not if, but when,” Saha added.
AWS Outage Takeaways
Saha is a longtime IT executive with a stellar IT career including in top executive roles at IBM, SoftLayer, AWS and Google Cloud.
He was VP and GM of for AWS’ databases business from 2014 until 2019, before jumping to competitor Google Cloud in 2019 as vice president and general manager for Google’s data analytics business. He became CEO of DataRobot in 2022.
Saha said AWS’ outage is a reminder for every organization to conduct a deep review of their own systems and architectures.
“Every business that relies on cloud infrastructure should have a clear strategy for resiliency,” Saha said. “That means thinking beyond a single data center or region, and ideally beyond a single provider, building for multi-region—and where possible—multi-cloud or hybrid environments.”
Saha said this strategy will inevitably add costs and complexity to an organization’s IT environment.
“But for any organization where uptime is mission-critical, that investment is well worth it,” DataRobot’s CEO said.
AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Are Now ‘Foundational To Digital Economy’
AWS, Microsoft and Google are the three largest cloud companies in the world, who generated roughly $75 billion in quarterly cloud infrastructure services revenue—combined—during the second quarter of 2025 alone.
Seattle-based AWS captured approximately $31 billion in cloud revenue in Q2 2025, representing an increase of 17 percent year over year.
The company now has a record annual run rate of $124 billion and owns approximately 30 percent share of the global cloud infrastructure services market, followed by Microsoft at 20 percent share, then Google Cloud at 13 percent share.
Saha said AWS’ outage having such a massive impact on the world at large raises a broad conversation about oversight and systemic risk.
“Hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have become foundational to the digital economy—so much so—that when one stumbles, the ripple effects can be felt across industries,” he said.
As reliance on these platforms deepens, Saha said, “There’s a case to be made for more robust frameworks around transparency, accountability, and perhaps even regulatory oversight.”
AWS Outage
AWS’ massive 15-hour-long global outage on Monday hit millions of people and businesses, affecting everything from payment services and financial trading applications to social media websites and commercial software.
AWS did not respond to a request for comment about the outage.
Over 4 million users reported issues on Downdetector.com related to AWS’ outage, according to Downdetector owner Ookla. The AWS outage reportedly affected over 1,000 companies.
The root cause of AWS’ outage stemmed from a Domain Name System (DNS) error that prevented applications from locating the correct address for DynamoDB. AWS’ DynamoDB is a cloud database that stores user information and other critical data.
Amazon will report the results of AWS’ third quarter 2025 financial earnings on Oct. 30.
