How AWS and Cloudflare Outages Disrupted Global Financial Services

A Report by CYS Global Remit FinTech Development Unit

Recently, both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare—two of the world's biggest internet infrastructure providers—experienced major outages that sent shockwaves through the financial services sector. These weren't isolated technical hiccups; they exposed fundamental vulnerabilities in how modern fintech platforms operate.

What Happened?

AWS went down because of an internal system error that caused one of its core data services to stop working, triggering cascading failures across countless applications that depend on it. Cloudflare's outage happened after a faulty update was pushed across its global network, causing systems to crash and rendering many websites and apps unreachable.

Crucially, neither breakdown was caused by cyberattacks. These were unexpected mistakes within the companies' own systems—a sobering reminder that even the most sophisticated infrastructure isn't immune to human error or technical failure.

The Fintech Fallout

The impact on financial services was immediate and severe. Banks, trading apps, payment services, and crypto platforms worldwide felt the disruption. Many fintech companies rely heavily on services like DynamoDB to store customer account data, process transactions, or verify identities in real time. When that service became unreachable, apps couldn't load balances, approve payments, or execute trades.

The Cloudflare outage caused high-traffic fintech sites—including forex and crypto trading platforms—to slow down or crash entirely. This led to missed trades, frozen dashboards, and lost revenue during market-moving hours. For everyday users, the experience was frustrating: payment errors, apps refusing to open, and trading screens that stopped refreshing at precisely the wrong moment.

The Response: Building for Resilience

Whilst Cloudflare remains one of the fastest, most secure content delivery networks available, these outages raised serious questions about the fragility of modern internet architecture and its obvious points of failure. The mature response isn't to immediately abandon these providers—they're industry leaders for good reason. Instead, companies are now focusing on resilience strategies:

• Multi-regional failover – ensuring systems can switch to backup regions when primary ones fail 

• Canary rollouts – testing updates on small portions of infrastructure before full deployment 

• Multi-CDN setups – distributing traffic across multiple content delivery networks 

• Hybrid-cloud strategies – avoiding dependence on any single provider

These approaches are now moving from "nice to have" to essential items in the backlogs of firms of all sizes.

The New Reality for Fintech

The AWS and Cloudflare outages underscore a critical reality: even the most advanced infrastructure providers can fail, and when they do, the financial industry feels the shock instantly. As fintech platforms become increasingly dependent on cloud databases, CDNs, and global routing networks, resilience can no longer rely on single-provider architectures.

The future of fintech stability will hinge on deliberate diversification. Multi-region deployments, safer rollout pipelines, and hybrid-cloud strategies must prevent any one failure from taking entire financial systems offline. In a landscape where seconds of downtime can translate into millions in losses, building for redundancy isn't just good practice—it's a fundamental requirement for trust and continuity.

For financial services providers, the message is clear: redundancy is no longer optional. It's the foundation upon which customer trust and business continuity must be built.