The early-morning AWS outage on October 20–21, 2025, was a wake-up call for enterprise architects who still equate multi-AZ with business resilience. The incident exposed a fundamental truth about cloud dependence in that even the cleanest multi-AZ design can fail if your control plane isn’t autonomous. For roughly two hours, identity, DNS, and API calls tethered to US-EAST-1 were unreachable, breaking service discovery and throttling authentication across otherwise healthy compute resources. In our view, this was not a failure of AWS infrastructure per se, rather it was a failure of completeness of architecture. Modern enterprises have built their businesses on top of shared control planes that cross regions and clouds. When those control planes fail, every region, zone, and microservice that depends on them inherits the problem.