Zapopan, Jalisco; October 21.—On October 20 , online work, digital services, and even global entertainment experienced a temporary outage due to a failure in the servers of Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the leading providers of remote connectivity services, colloquially known as “the cloud.”
This outage highlighted the digital vulnerability of millions of users and businesses that rely on remote storage. To analyze the impact and offer prevention strategies, Dr. Jafet Rodríguez, dean of the School of Engineering at the Universidad Panamericana Guadalajara Universidad Panamericana , explained the implications of this incident and shared recommendations for protecting and backing up critical information.
Global reliance on the cloud
For Dr. Jafet Rodríguez, the starting point is the shift toward the digital world that has taken place in recent years to safeguard the information generated on a daily basis.
“We’ve now entered an era in which we’ve moved to the famous ‘cloud.’ That thing people were talking about around 2010—not everyone knew what it was, and we used to say it was just a laptop connected to the Internet,” explained Dr. Jafet Rodríguez.
“These days, they’re massive servers, and there are mainly three companies providing the service: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Amazon is the largest of them all, and on October 20, we saw just how significant its impact can be.”
A global decline
The global AWS outage affected platforms such as Alexa, Fortnite, Roblox, MercadoLibre, Facebook, Reddit, and Waze, as well as educational services like Blackboard, which took hours to come back online.
According to a preliminary report, the cause of the outage was an error in the DNS system, which is responsible for translating IP addresses into domain names.
“An initial report indicates that it was a very common error in our DNS system. In theory, that’s what failed. So all the services were trying to access and connect to the cloud or the ‘warehouse’ where all the data is stored, but they weren’t getting a response, which is why they went down,” explained the dean of the School of Engineering.
He also added: “We’re in a difficult situation because the reality is that all of our infrastructure—including universities, as we’ve seen—has shifted from having our own local servers on campus to using these types of services, which in theory are available 24/7; if one service goes down, another immediately takes over, and there shouldn’t be any disruptions.”
Impact on universities and businesses
In the education sector, the outage on October 20 proved otherwise, with services like Blackboard taking hours to come back online.
“This time, the system went down early in the morning, and later in the day we were told that Blackboard was, in theory, back up and running,” he said, implying that the promise of constant availability had been compromised, leaving students and professors unable to access their course materials.
Physical backup: key to digital continuity
In light of these risks, Dr. Rodríguez emphasized the importance of keeping local copies and organizing information using hybrid methods. Among the key recommendations are:
- Keep physical backups on your own hard drives or servers.
- Perform incremental backups on a scheduled basis.
- Delete duplicate files to free up space and avoid confusion.
- Encrypt sensitive information and protect it with strong passwords.
- Enable privacy features or auto-delete settings in apps and messaging services.
- Diversify cloud services to avoid relying on a single provider.
- Spend time each month managing and cleaning data.
- Create mnemonic cues to help you remember where files are located.
- Accept the pace of the analog world, especially when faced with technical glitches.
“Every time I plug in my laptop, it automatically syncs with a hard drive. That way, I can keep working without relying on the cloud,” the professor explained .
Having physical backups not only ensures the availability of information but also guarantees full ownership of the data, preventing losses due to errors or changes in provider policies.
He advised spending time, “once a month, sit down for a couple of hours and really go through which photos we’re still going to use”. He also suggested “turning on disappearing mode, the vanish mode where messages disappear after a certain amount of time.”
He also emphasized the need to enhance cybersecurity for backups—that is, to encrypt the information or protect it with passwords to prevent unauthorized access in the event of theft—a crucial step in safeguarding sensitive information.
How to Prepare for Future Falls
Dr. Rodríguez noted that understanding how technologies work enables us to respond with greater resilience. He recommended returning to analog practices, such as seeking help from people with specific skills or using mnemonic devices to remember where information is located.
“If we have to do it the old-fashioned way, it will take longer, and we need to be patient,” he concluded.
He also advised against relying on a single system and recommended keeping backup options on alternative platforms such as Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Telegram to minimize the impact of a potential outage.
