AWS Went Down — Here’s What It Meant for Your SEO
Introduction
On October 20, 2025, the cloud infrastructure giant AWS experienced a massive outage—affecting not just individual websites but large swathes of the internet. The ripple effects were felt far and wide: apps, websites, payment and banking services, and even government portals were disrupted.
While the technical fault is still being unpacked, one area of impact that often gets less real-time attention is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). If your website was down, slow, or otherwise degraded during that period, the consequences may extend beyond immediate downtime into longer-term search visibility. In this blog we’ll explore how such outages affect SEO, what you should check now, and how to build resilience going forward.
What happened at AWS? (Very briefly)
AWS reported that the root issue was in its US-EAST-1 region: “significant API errors and connectivity issues … DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint” was cited. WIRED Newsweek
As a result, many services that depend on AWS infrastructure (directly or indirectly) experienced failures: websites wouldn’t load, apps wouldn’t respond, third-party integrations failed. The Guardian
The outage underlined the concentration risk: when a foundational cloud provider suffers a glitch, many downstream services suffer too. axios.com
AWS later confirmed services had “returned to normal operations” after mitigation.
Why SEO & Website Performance Matters in an Outage
Search engines like Google LLC (Google) and others evaluate websites on many dimensions beyond just content: site performance, reliability, crawlability, user experience, uptime and related signals all matter. If your site fails in one of the world’s cloud-infrastructure outages, you might be unintentionally brushing against several SEO risk factors simultaneously.
Here are three ways the outage could affect your SEO:
1. Crawlability & Indexing disruptions
If your website was unreachable (HTTP errors, DNS failures, timeouts) when search engine bots tried to crawl it, those bots may have registered “host not found” or “server error” signals. That can slow or stop indexing of new content.
If pages return errors or can’t be accessed when scheduled, it may reduce the frequency of crawl or cause re-evaluation.
Even a short period of outage can cause search engines to flag a site as less reliable.
2. Performance metrics & Core Web Vitals
The outage may have resulted in high Time To First Byte (TTFB), failed DNS, slow page loads. Poor performance signals feed into user experience metrics (bounce rate, session duration) which indirectly impact SEO.
If third-party integrations (analytics, chat widgets, tracking scripts) were down or failing, your front-end may have loaded more slowly or broken visual layout (affecting Cumulative Layout Shift, CLS).
Pages that load slowly or fail may degrade user trust and thus search engines may treat them as lower quality.
3. User experience & behavioural signals
Real users encountering “site not available” or “error connecting” will likely bounce immediately. Elevated bounce rates can signal poor experience.
If a website is down during peak traffic periods, it may lose conversions, return visits, and other behavioural signals that search algorithms may indirectly observe.
Even once the outage is over, the memory of unreliability can reduce repeat visitor rate or loyalty, which can affect long-term SEO and brand signals.
What to check now (Your SEO “post-outage checklist”)
If your website was impacted (even partially) by the AWS outage, it’s wise to conduct a review to ensure no lasting damage to SEO. Here’s a checklist:
Check Uptime / Availability Logs
Review your hosting / server logs to identify the outage window.
Determine how long your site was unavailable or degraded.
Note any DNS errors, 5xx status codes, slow responses during that time.
Check Google Search Console (or equivalent)
Look in the “Coverage” or “Indexing” reports for spikes in “Server error (5xx)”, “DNS error”, “Fetch timeout”.
See if any new content added around the outage period has not been indexed.
Check “Core Web Vitals” and performance reports for anomalies.
Review Performance Metrics
Look at historical data (Google Analytics, Matomo, etc.) for bounce rate, session duration, new vs returning users during and immediately after outage.
Monitor load times, TTFB, page-speed trends — compare pre- and post-outage.
Review third-party component failures (chat, forms, scripts) that may affect layout or user experience.
Crawl Your Site as a Bot
Use tools (like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, etc.) to crawl your site and check for unreachable pages, unusual redirects, missing resources.
Ensure your sitemap is correctly accessible and submitted.
Check Impacts on Links & Redirects
If pages were down or returned errors, inbound links may have experienced “link rot” temporarily — search engines sometimes discount links if the destination is unavailable.
Confirm critical pages (especially those driving traffic) are accessible and functioning normally.
Communicate & Document
If your audience noticed downtime (customers, subscribers) ensure you communicate apology or explanation where appropriate — trust matters.
Document what happened, how you responded, and what steps you will take to reduce risk in future.
Plan for Recovery & Monitoring
Set up real-user monitoring (RUM) and uptime alerts (e.g., Pingdom, UptimeRobot) so you are immediately aware if availability drops again.
Review third-party dependencies and make sure fallbacks or redundancy are in place.
Longer-Term Resilience: Minimising SEO Risk from Infrastructure Outages
An outage such as this one highlights how even top-tier cloud providers can fail — which means your site’s SEO risk isn’t just about keywords and content. Infrastructure and reliability matter too.
Here are strategic steps for improved resilience:
Consider multi-region or multi-cloud hosting: Having your website or critical services across multiple availability zones (or even cloud providers) reduces the risk of a single provider failure causing total outage.
Use a powerful CDN (Content Delivery Network): A CDN can help offload resources, serve cached content even if origin servers are down, reduce load times and improve user experience globally.
Implement fallback content / static site versions: In case your dynamic backend fails, having a static or cached version of key pages keeps your site live and avoids “site down” user experience.
Monitor and map third-party dependencies: Identify all critical scripts, widgets, payment gateways, analytics tools that your site uses — many of these might also rely on the same cloud provider. If they fail, your UX suffers.
Proactive SEO & performance audits: Regularly audit your site’s performance, uptime, Core Web Vitals, crawl errors and dependency map so you’re aware of potential weak points before they fail.
Communicate reliability as part of your brand: In many sectors, especially e-commerce or services, reliability becomes a competitive advantage. If your site works when competitors are down, you build trust, repeat business and favourable signals for SEO.
Final thoughts…
The October 2025 AWS outage serves as a wake-up call: SEO is not just about keywords, backlinks and content — it’s also about infrastructure, availability and user experience. If your website went down or degraded during that event, it’s worth auditing now. Even a few hours’ outage can ripple into crawl problems, slower loads, higher bounce rates and diminished user trust, all of which can hurt search visibility.
But it’s also an opportunity: by taking this incident as a catalyst to strengthen your architecture, monitor performance more closely and reduce dependency on a single point of failure, you can turn resilience into a competitive advantage. Your site will not only survive the next cloud-fail event — it will strengthen user trust, boost brand credibility and reinforce its SEO foundation.
