When the Cloud Breaks: Leadership Lessons from the AWS Outage
During the early hours of October 20th, a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) took hundreds of platforms offline and caused chaos for thousands of companies. Global brands like Snapchat, Venmo, Fortnite, Signal, and Ring were severely affected, along with UK institutions such as Lloyds Bank and HM Revenue & Customs. When the cloud goes down, the ripple effect hit with velocity and impact, and no organization is immune.
Whether you are a global enterprise or a main street business, when your business continuity is disrupted, it can cost you time, money, customers, and careers. Moments like these separate reactive organizations from resilient ones. That’s why Fallston Group teaches the Resilient Moment Communications Model — a practical framework that guides leaders through the uncertainty of crisis. This model, developed by Dr. George Everly, provides a strategic communications path for leaders of every organizational shape and size.
The Model suggests that if a leader answers the following five questions, at any stage of crisis, most questions that people have about an issue will have been answered:
What happened?
Be factual and transparent. AWS’s disruption apparently stemmed from an internal subsystem failure — not a cyber-attack. Clear early messaging prevents speculation from taking root.
What caused it?
Explain the root cause in plain language. Jargon confuses; clarity builds confidence.
What are the effects?
Acknowledge the human and business impact. From customer frustration to investor concern, empathy and accountability sustain trust.
What is being done about it?
Demonstrate decisive action. Communicate progress and solutions without over-promising. Precision and presence matter.
What needs to be done in the future?
Show learning and leadership. Strengthen systems, train teams, and rehearse responses before the next test.
The AWS outage is a real-time reminder that resiliency is not just technical — it is organizational. As we say at Fallston Group, ‘you don’t spin your way through crisis; you lead your way through.’
Fallston Group helps leaders prepare for, navigate through, and recover from issues of sensitivity, adversity, and crisis — because reputation leads to trust, and trust leads to valuation. For more information, link to www.fallstongroup.com.
– Rob Weinhold, Chief Executive of Fallston Group
