When the lights flickered across a huge portion of the internet in October 2025, people immediately blamed the data centers themselves. Social networks filled with jokes about servers melting in Northern Virginia. Streaming apps threw generic error pages. Support dashboards went blank. Even smart mattresses froze at the wrong temperature.
Within a few hours, it became a trending debate about whether a physical collapse took down the world’s most dominant cloud provider.
Nothing had burned. Nothing had been hacked. Power was fine. Cooling was fine. Physical infrastructure was steady. The trouble sat in a quiet corner of AWS’s internal automation, inside a DNS workflow that supports DynamoDB.
A small software defect in the US-EAST-1 region had a long shadow, and once it spread through the control plane, it brought new EC2 launches, networking workflows, identity requests, serverless systems, and load balancers along with it.
If you build anything on AWS, you probably saw the…
