alt Hacker News> The trigger was outages in cloud services with sometimes significant impacts on other internet services. Shortly before, an approximately 15-hour outage of the AWS cloud in the US meant that not only Amazon's own streaming services but also Atlassian, Docker, Epic Games, and the Signal messenger were unavailable or severely restricted.
If I remember correctly, it was a us-east-1 issue specifically. Why is everyone hosted in us-east-1, especially in Europe where stable and reliable regions are available (eu-west-1, eu-west-3, ...)?
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The issue originated in us-east-1 but had a huge blast radius beyond that - e.g. it took SES down.
Historically, AWS own infrastructure relies on us-east-1. Loosing us-east-1 usually means loosing many other AWS Global services which are required for services in other regions to be healthy.
Lots of AWS’s control surfaces are in us-east-1, and (not calling out any specific instances here) sometimes what’s call an “AWS outage” especially regarding us-east-1, is actually a limitation on accessing those control surfaces, ie, making changes to assets that are actually hosted elsewhere.
In such cases the services continue to operate as-is despite problems in us-east-1.
Not saying that’s not a problem, just, clarifying the scope.