Outages Happen. Even to the Cloud Giants!
When AWS or Azure go down, the web feels it.
In October 2025, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 suffered a global outage, taking critical business systems offline just hours before their quarterly earnings call (CNBC). A few days earlier, an AWS service interruption disrupted major retail and SaaS platforms across the U.S. for several hours (Wired).
Each time, the story repeats: the cloud provider recovers, but digital brands face hours of lost transactions, customer frustration, and brand damage that no “SLA credit” can repair.
That’s why dotCMS is introducing Multi-Region Resiliency (MRR), a cloud architecture designed to keep your digital experiences online, even when your primary cloud region isn’t.
So what is Multi-Region Resiliency
Multi-Region Resiliency enables dotCMS customers to host their digital experiences across two or more cloud regions ensuring zero downtime and optimal performance worldwide.
At its core, MRR leverages AWS Global Accelerator and dotCMS load balancers to intelligently route users to the fastest and healthiest region, while dotCMS keeps content synchronized between regions in real time through push publishing.
It’s a simple idea with powerful impact: continuous availability, seamless maintenance, and built-in geographic redundancy.
Key Benefits of Multi-Region Resiliency
Eliminate downtime, Even During Outages
If one AWS region becomes unavailable, your traffic is automatically rerouted to the secondary region. End users won’t notice a thing: no errors, no slowdowns, no service interruptions.
When the U.S. East region went down last month, entire eCommerce ecosystems froze for hours. With MRR, a failover to another live region keeps your site and APIs available throughout the event.
Always-On Maintenance Windows
Traditional CMS maintenance windows often require brief downtime or content freezes. With MRR, each region is updated independently, one at a time, ensuring your site remains live and operational throughout deployments, updates, or infrastructure upgrades.
This means your business operations continue uninterrupted while your technical teams maintain stability and compliance behind the scenes.
Geographic Load Balancing for Performance
Coupled with AWS Global Accelerator, dotCMS routes users to the closest and healthiest region, improving page load times, API response, and overall digital experience.
Global customers see faster interactions, while localized audiences in North America, Europe, and APAC benefit from low-latency access to content hosted near them.
Currently supported regions include:
AWS: US-East, CA-Central, Sydney
GCP: EU-Central (Frankfurt)
Minimum Change Management
MRR was designed for simplicity. It uses dotCMS’s existing push publishing framework, allowing teams to distribute content to multiple regions without altering their existing workflows.
No new pipelines to configure
No manual synchronization
Always-in-sync content between all regions
The architecture extends what customers already know and trust about dotCMS.
Real-World Impact: When Downtime Has a Dollar Value
For one global HVAC manufacturer, uptime isn’t a technical metric, it’s a business imperative.
Their primary digital property drives engagement with dealers, distributors, and commercial partners worldwide. Every minute of downtime translates directly to lost transactions and delayed equipment orders.
During the most recent AWS outage, the company modeled the potential financial impact. With $5.3 billion in annual revenue, about 20% driven through digital channels, a three-hour regional outage would have cost nearly $400,000 in lost eCommerce revenue.
Architecture Overview: How It Works
Multi-Region Resiliency in dotCMS Cloud uses an active-active configuration: both regions serve live traffic simultaneously, synchronized through dotCMS push publishing and monitored via AWS Global Accelerator health checks.
When one region experiences degradation:
AWS Global Accelerator detects the failure in real time.
Traffic automatically reroutes to the secondary region.
dotCMS ensures continuous content consistency across both environments.
Developers and DevOps teams retain full visibility and control, with no special code changes or integration work required.
For hybrid or self-hosted customers, MRR principles can also be applied using your own AWS accounts or global load balancer configurations giving you flexibility in how redundancy is achieved.
Why Resiliency Is the New Reliability
In a digital ecosystem that never sleeps, availability is the new currency of trust.
Your customers don’t care why a site is down, they simply expect it to work. Resiliency has become the backbone of digital experience management, sitting at the intersection of engineering excellence and brand reliability.
The outages of 2025 reminded the industry that even hyperscale clouds aren’t invincible. The only true safeguard is architectural resilience at the application layer, the ability to withstand infrastructure failures without losing service continuity.
That’s precisely what Multi-Region Resiliency delivers for dotCMS customers:
a fault-tolerant, high-performance foundation for modern, global digital experiences.
Learn More
Multi-Region Resiliency is now available for dotCMS Cloud customers, with deployment options in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia.
Learn how your organization can achieve true zero-downtime performance and business continuity — even during major cloud outages.
Learn more about Multi-Region Resiliency in dotCMS Cloud