Over the days last week, a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) disruption in the US-EAST-1 region rippled across the internet. Big-name consumer apps stalled, smart devices misbehaved, and a long list of business tools faltered. Reports point to DNS issues cascading across dependent services, with recovery through 20–21 October (UTC) and beyond.
For many in Ghana and across Africa, this felt distant and immediate at the same time. The failure happened thousands of kilometres away, yet the effects were right here on our phones, tills, and dashboards. That’s the reality of a connected economy: when hyperscale infrastructure hiccups, we all feel it. Regulators and analysts in Europe even called out concentration risk when a single provider powers so much of the public and private sector.
The African connection: tech is now everyday infrastructure
Across the continent, technology is the fabric of daily life and business operations. Payments and mobile money. Hospital systems and national insurance. E-commerce and delivery. Port logistics and airline check-in. Agri platforms that send weather tips or manage subsidies. Education, messaging, and identity. When a global cloud region struggles, any of these services can slow down or stop.
If that sounds abstract, consider the human edge cases that made headlines: connected mattresses that overheated or locked upright because their cloud back-end went offline. It’s an odd story with a serious lesson — even simple physical comfort now depends on reliable cloud links.
The real cost of downtime
Outages aren’t just an IT problem. They interrupt cash flow, dent trust, and waste time.
- Lost revenue: payment failures, abandoned baskets, and offline POS.
- Service delays: hospital lookups, lab results, or insurance checks that time out.
- Operational drag: teams stuck waiting for CRMs, ERPs, or ticketing tools to load.
- Customer frustration: every failed login, every spinning wheel, every frozen app.
Even where recovery is measured in hours, the costs compound. This week’s disruption slowed or stopped thousands of sites and services worldwide before AWS declared systems “back to normal.”
Why this keeps happening
Three structural realities make incidents like this so consequential:
- Concentration: a large share of the internet runs on a handful of providers and regions. When one has trouble, the blast radius is large.
- Complex dependencies: modern apps stitch together many cloud services. A DNS problem in one layer can break sign-ins, databases, or queues elsewhere.
- Distance: many African services still rely on far-off regions. Latency is one issue; the bigger challenge is that remote failures are outside local control.
A better path: build resilience where we live and work
Africa’s digital growth story demands infrastructure that is closer, tougher, and more diverse.
Closer means local or regional data centres that cut latency, improve user experience, and keep critical systems reachable even when overseas networks are congested. Tougher means Tier-rated facilities with redundant power, cooling, and connectivity, operated to international standards, with clear SLOs and tested failover. More diverse means hybrid and multi-cloud designs, active-active options across regions, and disaster-recovery plans that include local capacity rather than a single dependency.
Regulators abroad are already warning about over-reliance on a few “critical third parties.” African boards and CIOs should take note and get ahead of the curve.
What African organisations can do now
- Map your dependencies. List the cloud regions and third-party APIs every critical workflow touches. If they cluster in one geography, you have concentration risk.
- Prioritise business services, not servers. Identify what must never go down (payments, clinical lookups, trading, customer support) and design resilience around those paths.
- Adopt hybrid on purpose. Use global cloud features where they shine, and anchor latency-sensitive or sovereign workloads in local facilities with strong SLAs.
- Test failover. Run game-days. Prove you can switch DNS, move traffic, and keep customer data consistent.
- Bring the network home. Reduce hops by peering locally and using regional IXs to keep African traffic in-region when possible.
- Watch the “edge cases.” Smart devices, badge systems, and building tech often depend on distant clouds. Give them local fallbacks so they fail safe, not fail shut.
How Onix helps build that resilience
Onix operates West Africa’s only Tier IV-certified, carrier-neutral colocation data centre in Accra, delivering 99.995% expected uptime with eight-layer security and diverse network options. Our solar-powered operations cover daytime energy needs, reducing cost and carbon while strengthening resilience. For customers, that means a stable local anchor for hybrid and multi-cloud designs, closer to users and under your control.
What this looks like in practice:
- Hybrid landing zone: run core databases or latency-sensitive services in Onix, burst or back up to global cloud.
- Active-active regional setup: use Onix as your Ghana region, paired with a second African location or a global region for continuity.
- Network diversity: connect to multiple carriers and cloud on-ramps through our carrier-neutral ecosystem to avoid single points of failure.
- Regulatory and data residency alignment: keep customer PII or sensitive workloads local while integrating with global SaaS.
- Sustainability by default: improve the energy profile of your stack by placing steady workloads in a solar-backed facility.
A quick checklist for CIOs and COOs
- Do we rely on a single cloud region today? If it fails, what breaks first?
- Which services must be available within Ghana even if an overseas region is offline?
- Where will our primary and secondary DNS resolve from?
- When did we last test failover and measure RTO/RPO against real targets?
- Which workloads belong in a local Tier IV facility, and which can remain in global cloud?
- How are we peered locally to serve users fast when upstream links are congested?
The takeaway
Last week’s AWS disruption is not an indictment of the cloud. It’s a reminder that resilient digital economies are built on diversity, locality, and tested design. Africa’s growth depends on it. The next time a distant region stumbles, Ghanaian businesses should keep moving.
Onix is ready to help. If you want to stress-test your architecture, assess region and provider risk, or design a hybrid landing zone in Accra, our team can work with your engineers and integrators to shape a plan that fits your business. Reach out to us and let’s collaborate!
