Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by abofh 27 days ago
I've been in AWS for almost twenty years at this point. It's been a long time since I've seen a global outage of the data plane on anything. The control plane, especially the US-east-1 services? Yes - but if you're off of east-1, your outages are measured in missile strikes, not botched deployments.
2 comments
andreareina 27 days ago
Didn't the latest outage affect people not on us-east-1 because internal aws services depend on us-east-1?
link
erikerikson 27 days ago
The impacts are usually partial. For example, scaling is impacted but everything already deployed contributes to work up to capacity. Or, you can't change configuration but the previous configuration works as configured. Often surprisingly not so impactful even if there can be limited work stoppage.
link
hasyimibhar 27 days ago
The problem with the us-east-1 outage is that a lot of big companies are there, so even if you try your best not to depend on us-east-1, your third party providers are most likely there. In my previous company, we were completely down during us-east-1 outage because of other dependencies that are beyond our control.
link
erikerikson 27 days ago
Entirely fair. I have thus far avoided that problem. Not always engineering's choice.
link
HighGoldstein 27 days ago
Considering how many AWS and non-AWS services go down at least partially when us-east-1 fails, this reads somewhat like "Don't worry that the steering wheel and pedals aren't working, your engine is still running on cruise control".
link
happymellon 27 days ago
Work for a major bank who isn't solely in US East 1.

No it didn't impact us.

link
shrikant 27 days ago
I can easily remember a few multi-hour AWS incidents from the last few years, since I've had to handle the resulting fires at my various employers at those times. Not sure how you missed these, or do they not count as "global outages" for some reason?

December 2021: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/aws-outage-takes-do...

June 2023: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-52

October 2025: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/20/amazon-web-services-outage-t...

Each of these were massive outages impacting very large services across the web.

link