AWS US-East-1 Outage
When the internet went down
Money Burned
Millions in lost revenue across the internet
Body Count
1,000+ sites offline, 6.5M Downdetector reports
Lifespan
1 days (0 years)
☠️ Official Cause of Death
Race condition in DNS management
A rare race condition in DynamoDB's DNS management system cascaded into a 15-hour outage. Snapchat, Slack, Robinhood, Venmo, Roblox, Fortnite, Ring, Lyft, Pokémon GO - all down. The single point of failure everyone warned about finally failed.
Epitaph
All eggs, one basket
US-East-1 took them down
The cloud became fog
Famous Last Words
"Why does everything depend on one region?"
"We're experiencing increased error rates in US-EAST-1"
"Maybe we should have built multi-region after all"
💡 The Lesson
Multi-region isn't optional, it's survival
I Was There Too
Raise your hand. Be honest. We all fuck up.
Anonymous SRE • On-call engineer that night
I was the one who got paged at 11:49 PM. Spent 15 hours watching DynamoDB DNS fail in slow motion. We knew multi-region was important. Budget said otherwise. Never making that mistake again.
October 21, 2025
Alex K. • CTO at a startup that went down
Our entire platform depended on US-East-1. 'We'll add multi-region later' I said. 15 hours of downtime and $50k in lost revenue later, we're now properly multi-region. Expensive lesson.
October 22, 2025
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Enjoyed Reading About AWS US-East-1 Outage's Death?
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