What Happened with AWS on 20 October 2025 and Why Interprefy Was Unaffected

On 20 October 2025, a major infrastructure incident at AWS disrupted many online services around the world. In this blog we will look at what exactly happened, why the event is important for organisations reliant on cloud infrastructure, and how Interprefy — our multilingual event and interpretation platform — was not materially affected thanks to the resilience built into our architecture.
We will also take the opportunity to highlight what event-organisers and technology buyers should look for when selecting a platform for mission-critical multilingual events.

The AWS Outage: What Happened

Here is a breakdown of the incident:

When & where

• The outage began late on 19 October US time and became widely noticeable globally from early on 20 October UTC, originating in AWS’s Northern Virginia region.

• AWS acknowledged “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services in US-East-1.

• The problem affected many Availability Zones (AZs) in that region, and had ripple effects globally.

What caused it

• According to AWS, the issue started when a problem in their Northern Virginia region disrupted how certain systems located and connected to a key database service (DynamoDB). This caused errors to spread through other internal systems, which led to wider disruptions across multiple services. Some reports also suggest that an internal monitoring process may have contributed to the cascading impact.

Which services were impacted

• Many major platforms and applications went offline or degraded. Examples include: Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, the Ring smart-home devices, the Reddit platform and others.

• According to tracking services, millions of user-reports were generated across dozens of platforms globally.

Resolution

• By evening of 20 October AWS stated that services had returned to “normal operations.

• Some backlog of messages and delayed recovery remained, as noted by AWS.

Why This Is Significant for the Events Industry (and What the Lessons Are)

For the events industry — especially those running multilingual conferences, hybrid meetings, or live broadcasts requiring interpretation — this outage is a major wake-up call. It proves that even the world’s biggest cloud providers can experience failure, and when they do, interpretation platforms that aren’t architected for resilience can simply go silent mid-event.

Here are the lessons event professionals should take away:

• Never rely on a platform hosted in a single cloud region or provider. If your interpretation or translation platform is tied to just one provider or region, a regional failure can instantly cut off language channels, leaving global participants unable to follow the event.

• Resilience must be built into the event tech stack, not assumed. Interpreters, attendees and speakers don’t care why the stream stopped — they just know the event failed. Platforms must have redundancy across regions and providers with automatic fallback routing.

• Architecture directly affects event continuity. A cost-saving decision to deploy with only one provider and in a single region may work under normal circumstances, but during an outage it can force event organisers to pause or cancel sessions — losing audience trust and jeopardising revenue and reputation.

• Cloud services can fail — and interpretation can be collateral damage. Even if your platform provider isn’t at fault, their dependency on a single provider or cloud region means interpretation feeds, captions and translations can suddenly stop working.

• Regulatory and client expectations around uptime are rising. With many events now mission-critical and broadcast globally, clients are increasingly demanding proof of resilience, redundancy and backup strategy — not just uptime claims. It´s time to ask how resilient areour events?

• Disaster recovery planning must explicitly include cloud-based interpretation platforms. Event planners must ask vendors: What happens if your main cloud region goes down mid-event? How fast do you fail over? Is the switch seamless for interpreters and attendees?

How Interprefy’s Architecture Protects Against Single-Provider Failures

At Interprefy we understand the importance of global resilience — especially when you are organising multilingual events that must run without interruption. Here’s how our infrastructure and approach mitigate the kind of risk exposed by the AWS outage:

Global redundant servers

• Interprefy’s platform uses cloud-based redundant servers across the globe (multiple regions and multiple cloud providers).

• Because traffic and services are not confined solely to one provider (e.g., AWS) or region, the architecture is inherently more resilient: if one region goes down, load can be routed via other regions/servers.

Browser-based access and flexible deployment

• Our web platform allows attendees to join via browser (no heavy local client dependency), meaning we can adapt routing behind the scenes and shift traffic between nodes/regions with less friction.

• For interpreters and event participants this means less reliance on a single endpoint, hence a better fail-over scenario.

Event-grade security and service reliability

• We deploy enterprise-grade protection (encryption, standards, certifications) and anticipate multi-region coverage rather than single-zone. 

• We integrate with AV/event stacks but the core platform is cloud-agnostic to a degree and built for scale.

Why Interprefy was not significantly impacted by the AWS outage

Given the architecture above, here is why we confidently say that the AWS outage on 20 October did not materially affect Interprefy or our clients:

• The incident was localised to AWS’s US-East-1 region (Northern Virginia) and associated Availability Zones. Because we utilise redundant global servers, our service did not rely solely on that region.

• Even if one provider had degraded, our traffic could be rerouted via other nodes/regions — meaning that clients using Interprefy would not have been subject to the same single-point-of-failure.

• In short: whereas a platform hosted exclusively in AWS would have been impacted, our multi-region and multi-provider redundant architecture safeguards against that scenario.

Important information for event organisers

No cloud platform can promise absolute zero risk — but what matters is how well a provider prepares for, mitigates, and responds to disruption.

Here’s where Interprefy stands apart:

While all cloud-based systems depend on underlying networks and third-party services, Interprefy’s globally distributed, redundant server infrastructure is specifically designed to minimise single points of failure.

Our fail-over systems are not theoretical — they are actively tested and continuously optimised to ensure rapid recovery and uninterrupted interpretation delivery.

For mission-critical events, clients gain the reassurance of proven reliability, SLAs backed by real-world performance, and a platform already architected to withstand regional outages like the recent AWS incident.

In short: while no vendor can eliminate risk entirely, Interprefy’s multi-region resilient design, operational readiness and proven continuity record make it one of the safest and most future-proof choices for multilingual events.

What This Means for Clients Choosing a Multilingual Event Platform

If you’re organising multilingual events — whether online, hybrid or in-person — the AWS outage of 20 October is a timely reminder of what to check and ask when selecting a service provider:

Key questions to ask a vendor:

• In how many cloud regions is your service deployed? Are there redundant availability zones across providers?

• Which cloud providers do you use (just AWS or also Azure/GCP)? Is your architecture multi-cloud or multi-region within one provider?

• What happens if one region goes down: can traffic be automatically shifted to another region with minimal disruption?

• What is your Service Level Agreement (SLA) for uptime, fail-over and disaster recovery?

• Do you have case-studies or documented events where fail-over was triggered and the service continued uninterrupted?

• What monitoring and observability do you have in place to detect issues early, and how is traffic routed under error scenarios?

Why architecture matters for event-organisers:

• Multilingual events often have global audiences and tight schedules — any interruption can damage reputation, attendee experience and downstream analytics.

• Vendors with weak architecture can become “hostage” to single-provider outages. The AWS incident shows how major the impact can be.

• Investing a little more upfront in selecting a resilient platform can save a lot in reputational risk and remediation cost later.

Why Interprefy aligns with best practice:

• At Interprefy we already operate a platform designed for global scale, multilingual access, and cloud-redundant architecture.

• Our architecture means you are less exposed to the provider-wide failures exemplified by the AWS outage.

• We encourage clients to ask precisely the questions above and are transparent about our global infrastructure, disaster-recovery practices and support model.

Conclusion

The AWS outage on 20 October 2025 is a wake-up call to organisations that rely heavily on cloud-single-region deployments. It shows how even the largest infrastructure-providers are not immune to internal failures, and how the ripples of a regional fault can affect thousands of services globally.

For multilingual event platforms the lesson is clear: resilience must be engineered in. At Interprefy we believe our global redundant-server architecture, browser-based deployment model and scale-ready platform make us significantly less vulnerable to the kind of disruption experienced by an AWS-only deployment.

If your organisation is planning a mission-critical multilingual event, this incident offers a chance to ask hard questions about your vendor’s architecture, fail-over strategy and service continuity. In the unpredictable world of cloud services, “redundant” is not optional — it’s essential.