Fax Resilience: Lessons From the October 2025 AWS Outage

Posted on: October 27, 2025

On October 20th, 2025, Amazon Web Services suffered an outage that disrupted dozens of websites, apps, and connected devices. In AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, an hours-long DNS resolution issue blocked access to DynamoDB, creating downstream errors  and a backlog of serverless tasks.

For technical leadership, the takeaway is clear: relying on a single IaaS provider is itself an architectural choice, not an exemption from architectural responsibility. Your organization is ultimately responsible for application availability and disaster recovery.

From Technical Glitches to Business Consequences

Within hours, a cloud outage can escalate into a business crisis:

• Lost revenue from failed payments, disabled customer access, or paused workflows.
• Eroded customer trust when services vanish or degrade in front of users.
• Compliance risk if regulated processes (as in healthcare or finance) fail, triggering audits or penalties.
• Idle staff and wasted operations budget when your team is firefighting.

In healthcare, outages may cause lost opportunities and decreased patient satisfaction if critical systems—like public cloud fax services—go offline during working hours.

Why fax workflows demand extra attention

Fax remains a mission-critical channel in regulated industries like healthcare. Most public cloud fax services uphold strong service levels, but customers and end users have no control over their architecture and DR strategy. 

If your organization can’t accept the risk of a single IaaS provider, then you need a solution that:

• Abstracts away from single-region cloud failure modes.
• Implements geo-redundancy, failover and fallback channels.
• Provides operations visibility and control under your own governance.

Built-In Resilience With Private Fax Cloud®

There are some straightforward and proven steps to reduce the risk by orders of magnitude without disproportionate cost or complexity. Private Fax Cloud® can be configured to:

• Run on multiregional architecture so the fax-application layer can survive a regional IaaS failure.
• Support failover and disaster recovery configurations to minimize impact when a regional outage does occur.
• Offer monitoring, alerting and orchestration for quick diagnosis and resolution of service issues.
• Align your key fax workflows with your DR processes from day one, rather than grafting them on afterward.

Private Fax Cloud operates as a managed service. Our team can own monitoring and responses, taking them off your plate to whatever degree your organization wants. For those who prefer more hands-on management, full access and control are always available.

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The AWS outage is a stark reminder that even robust services still fail. Fax service availability—or lack thereof—are not merely the cloud provider’s job, but consequences of your architectural decisions.

Private Fax Cloud combines the OpenText Fax engine with our own best-practice architecture refined through decades of healthcare fax implementations. It’s a relatively simple way to build layers of resilience into high-stakes fax workflows, so an outage in one service doesn’t halt your operations.

Reach out today to learn more or discuss your availability goals with a senior solutions engineer.