When the Cloud Crashes: The AWS Outage as a Real-World Case Study for the ISC Section of the CPA Exam

AWS powers much of the modern world | ©️ ABC News

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that started early Monday morning created widespread interruptions for banks, corporations, governments, and airlines. Even after Amazon said it was back up and running, issues continued well into the day, even through halftime of Monday Night Football.

It was a reminder of how one company’s infrastructure powers much of the modern world, and how fragile things become when that single point of failure breaks.

Now, I’m pretty sure many of you reading this can say you’ve contributed to Amazon’s profit. The stack of Amazon boxes on your front porch is proof. We love the convenience of next-day deliveries, and the feeling of opening that box, but those purchases are a small piece of the story. The real money is in the platform.

Amazon’s e-commerce business brought in roughly $28 billion in profit last year, but its cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), generated more than $90 billion in revenue on its own. AWS supports nearly one-third of all cloud computing activity worldwide. It’s the infrastructure behind streaming platforms like Netflix and Roku, data storage, payment systems, and enterprise security. When AWS falters, the world feels it - from corporate boardrooms to your living room couch.

The AWS Outage and the CPA Exam

For CPA candidates, this was a live case study for the Information Systems and Controls section of the CPA exam.

When Amazon AWS went down, streaming stopped, online payments failed, and countless websites froze. Luckily, the kids were in school, because imagine a Saturday morning when Roblox and Fortnite are offline. Parents everywhere would have been calling customer service, rebooting routers, and silently panicking while pretending everything was fine.

That’s the ripple effect of Amazon AWS. When it breaks, it interrupts business AND daily life. That’s how connected this infrastructure is: from global banks to the porch.

CPA Exam: The ISC Blueprint

In Area I, you study information security and data management. During this outage, think about what happened to data availability and access. How were backups handled? Were there recovery points in place to prevent loss? What happens when financial data tied to customer payments sits in a system that’s offline for hours?

In Area II, you study business continuity and disaster recovery. That’s where you see how companies plan for what to do when systems go down. For example, if a small business like a locally owned dry cleaner runs its point-of-sale system on Amazon AWS and the system crashes, what happens next? Can they still accept orders? Can customers still pay? Do they have a backup process or a manual workaround?

This is where the CPA mindset starts forming. You learn to connect risk, operations, and business judgment. Because when a system breaks, you’re not only accounting for downtime—you’re accounting for lost data, delayed transactions, and the financial reporting impact that follows.

Then there’s Area III, SOC engagements. Amazon AWS is a third-party service provider. Its systems store and process data for thousands of companies, and those companies rely on CPAs to validate that their vendors’ controls are sound. SOC reporting provides that assurance:

• SOC 1 focuses on controls that affect financial reporting.

• SOC 2 covers controls related to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

• SOC 3 summarizes those results for public use.

  
  

When Amazon AWS fails, it’s not only a technology story. It’s an accounting and assurance story. It’s about vendor risk management, system reliability, and control testing in motion.

This is exactly what we cover inside the Winston CPA Exam Review. We take moments like this and walk through what failed, what worked, and how a CPA would evaluate it. You can’t audit what you don’t understand, and you can’t explain what you haven’t connected.

Get CPA Exam Coaching Online

I learned the importance of connecting what you study to what you see long before I took the CPA exam. My financial accounting professor, David Williams, at the Max M. Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University, taught us based on the headlines. Most days, we started class with what was happening in the Wall Street Journal (most notably the Sears and K-mart merger). That habit shaped how I see accounting today: as a living, breathing ecosystem that tells the story of a business.

Professor Terry Ziegler, his wife, also had a memorable way of teaching accounting. I remember the first day of class when she laid out her ground rules in a way that had me turning up my nose like, who does this lady think she is?! She was talking CASH MONEY about what’s going to happen, what’s not going to happen, what she’s not going to tolerate, and what her expectations are. By the second class, half the seats were empty. I looked around the room and realized I had answered my own question of who she thinks she is, because she’s exactly who she thinks she is, and I’m grateful for her approach in weeding out the people who weren’t going to take this seriously so we could get to work.

That’s the same energy that fuels how I teach today. My CPA exam programs are built for candidates who want to learn accounting in real life. We don’t stay in the textbook. We connect what’s happening in business to the concepts you need to know. Because when you can explain why, the how becomes second nature.

If you’ve been studying on your own and still don’t feel confident, this is your sign to join us in my CPA exam coaching program online. It teaches you how to think like a CPA and you learn when it's best for you -whether that's 5pm or 5am. Start here to preview my way of CPA exam prep and learn a better way to study.

Accounting is a complex yet eloquent way of telling the financial story of a business, and in order to tell that story, you have to know what’s going on. The CPA exam throws scenarios in front of you that mirror what happens in business every day, and it’s a matter of learning to see what’s happening around you first, then understanding how it connects back to what you need to know as a newly licensed CPA.

So when you sit down to study after work or after the kids are in bed, remember that you’re going beyond studying for the CPA exam to learning how to move AFTER you pass the exam. Look at what’s happening in business. Observe how organizations handle risk, control, and recovery. Pay attention to the headlines, because the real-world examples you notice today will become the judgment you apply tomorrow.

If this kind of learning speaks to you, I invite you into my CPA exam coaching program. The goal is not to know everything covered on the exam, it's to develop a foundational understanding of accounting that enables you to make the right decisions: on your feet, with limited information, and when clients and bosses rely on you for the answer.