Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On October 19-20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage (AWS status) affecting its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia. The root cause was DNS resolution failures for DynamoDB’s API endpoints, which cascaded across AWS’s interconnected services, disrupting major platforms including Snapchat, McDonald’s, Disney+, Roblox, Coinbas, Reddit, and Amazon’s own services.

On October 20, 2025, much of the internet came to a halt. Apps wouldn’t load. Payments failed. Cloud dashboards went dark. From Fortnite to Alexa, Snapchat, and countless business platforms, users across the world were suddenly offline — all because DNS broke inside Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) US-East-1 region.

Early on October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage affecting its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia. The root cause was DNS resolution failures for DynamoDB’s API endpoints, which cascaded across AWS’s interconnected services.

When DNS or domain name server resolution processes fail, or become sluggish, users can experience timeouts, connection errors, and degraded performance — often without clear indication of the root cause. This is where DNS checks in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring come in, allowing you proactively monitor domain name resolution, verify that domains resolve to the correct IP address, and even measure how quickly that resolution occurs.

Most clients don’t care how DNS works—until it breaks. But as an MSP, you know the damage a single DNS misconfiguration or unnoticed change can cause. So how do you prove the ROI of DNS monitoring to clients who don't speak in TTLs or CNAMEs? Here’s how to bridge the gap between technical benefits and business value—so your clients understand exactly why they’re paying for DNS protection.

DNS is one of the most important and most overlooked layers in your client’s infrastructure. As an MSP, you’re often the one who gets blamed when something breaks—whether you control the DNS or not. And while many DNS problems are silent, their consequences are loud: email failures, website outages, and frustrated clients. This DNS security checklist will help you proactively identify and fix DNS risks across all your client domains.

Your domain name is your digital real estate. It is how customers find you, search engines rank you, and your brand builds trust in the digital world. Whether you run a small blog, an e-commerce store, or a large business, your domain is the foundation of your online activities. But what happens if you forget to renew it? A domain expiry can cause your site to go offline. It can also hurt your SEO rankings and affect your website traffic.

On July 14, Cloudflare’s popular public DNS service (known as 1.1.1.1) suffered an outage lasting over two hours. As rumors swirled about the cause, we were the first to push back on the theory that a BGP hijack had caused the outage. In fact, the hijack was actually a consequence. How did we know this so early when other internet watchers did not? We’ll discuss in this post.

Most MSPs don’t advertise DNS monitoring as a service—but they should. Why? Because when DNS goes wrong, your client won’t blame their registrar or email provider. They’ll blame you. And the worst part? You probably didn’t know anything had changed until the problem reached your inbox.