Ensuring Branch · Site · Network Resiliency with Dispersive Stealth Networking
This post is a quick response from Scott Higgins, Senior Director of Engineering at Dispersive, following the recent AWS US-East-1 outage. The incident serves as a powerful reminder of why network resiliency and architectural redundancy matter more than ever.
On October 20, 2025, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) US-East-1 region suffered a major outage that rippled across the globe. Cloud applications slowed or went dark. Social platforms, consumer apps, collaboration tools, and enterprise workloads were all affected.
The root cause? A failure in AWS’s internal load-balancer health checks and endpoint handling. But the impact went far beyond a single region—it cascaded through dependent services worldwide, underscoring just how interconnected today’s digital infrastructure has become.
For enterprises, the lesson is clear: Single-region, single-path, and single-provider dependencies create systemic risk.
Every outage—whether caused by infrastructure instability, misconfiguration, or cyber disruption—translates directly to halted operations, lost productivity, customer impact, and reputational cost.
Modern enterprises run on distributed networks that span branch offices, remote users, data centers, SaaS, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud environments. Yet even these complex ecosystems often rely on single points of failure:
• One region
• One cloud provider
• One WAN circuit
• One gateway
Even with SD-WAN or MPLS, legacy models lack real-time remediation, self-healing, and sub-second failover. The result: when the network falters, the business falters.
Dispersive Stealth Networking changes that equation.
1. Self-Healing Cloud Fabric with Continuous Telemetry and Data Deflects
Dispersive continuously measures telemetry across all active paths and uses data deflects to detect degradation before it causes disruption. When instability appears, traffic is automatically rerouted in real time—maintaining transport stability across cloud, WAN, and branch paths.
2. Active-Active Gateways for Site Resiliency
Dispersive supports high-availability, active-active gateways. If a gateway, site, or regional edge fails, traffic seamlessly shifts to the paired gateway with no downtime. The business stays connected—even when infrastructure doesn’t.
3. Multi-WAN with Sub-Second Failover
Dispersive enables enterprises to run multiple WAN providers simultaneously. If a primary circuit fails, traffic cuts over in under one second—keeping applications, users, and branches online without interruption.
During the October 20 AWS US-East-1 outage, Dispersive SaaS customers remained operational. That resilience was no accident.
It stemmed from:
• A distributed software architecture that avoids single-region dependency
• Active-active, multi-path design that dynamically adjusts traffic
• Multi-provider, multi-transport support across public and private networks
• Real-time, self-healing behavior built into every connection
Resiliency isn’t an add-on. It’s an architectural choice, and it is core to how Dispersive is built.
With Dispersive Stealth Networking, organizations gain:
✅ Always-on connectivity — even during provider or regional failures
✅ Reduced downtime risk — fewer crises and escalations
✅ Higher productivity — branches, apps, and users stay connected
✅ Lower cost and complexity — no need for idle backup circuits
✅ Better customer experience — resiliency becomes a competitive edge
Because multi-cloud + multi-region ≠ multi-path.
True resiliency requires active paths, not passive backups.
1. Identify your mission-critical branch-to-cloud and application paths.
2. Evaluate Dispersive in a live proof-of-concept—see multi-WAN cutover and self-healing behavior in real time.
📞 Learn more or request a demo: www.dispersive.io
References
• AWS US-East-1 outage (October 20, 2025) – coverage by Reuters, AP News, The Verge, ThousandEyes, and AWS incident reports.
• Cost of downtime: Gartner research estimates enterprise IT downtime can range from $5,600 per minute to $300,000 per hour, depending on scale
Header image courtesy of kp yamu Jayanath from Pixabay.