Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On October 20, 2025, much of the internet came to a halt. Apps wouldn’t load. Payments failed. Cloud dashboards went dark. From Fortnite to Alexa, Snapchat, and countless business platforms, users across the world were suddenly offline — all because DNS broke inside Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) US-East-1 region.

The siren song of building a custom, internal cloud cost management platform is enticing. Many brilliant engineering teams are convinced they can come up with a bespoke solution that perfectly fits their needs. They look at their company’s unique infrastructure and decide they can DIY cost management without having to rely on an external vendor. Believe me, I get the temptation.

On October 19-20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage (AWS status) affecting its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia. The root cause was DNS resolution failures for DynamoDB’s API endpoints, which cascaded across AWS’s interconnected services, disrupting major platforms including Snapchat, McDonald’s, Disney+, Roblox, Coinbas, Reddit, and Amazon’s own services.

Looking for the best cloud storage deals? You’re in the right place, and since Black Friday is just around the corner, now is the perfect time. This time of year, companies offer their biggest deals on everything from tech gadgets, beauty, video games, and much more. But for cloud storage, we’ve got you covered with the best cloud storage deals of the year, allowing you to store, backup, sync, and share your files with friends, family, or colleagues.

When external SaaS providers or cloud services degrade or go down, engineers often find themselves wondering if the issue they're encountering is local or more widespread. The answers they find are usually slow to surface, limited in detail, or entirely dependent on the provider's updates. Vendor-controlled status pages and third-party aggregators don’t provide the timely, independent visibility that's necessary to quickly and accurately identify the root cause of slowdowns.

A global outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) did more than knock popular apps offline. It laid bare the cost risks embedded in many cloud architectures. As services fail, the hidden costs of high availability, from redundancy planning to recovery operations, often multiply. For cloud cost leaders, this isn’t an issue of uptime; it’s a visibility and budget-shock issue. It’s a key reminder that architecting for resilience involves difficult trade-offs.

Early on October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage affecting its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia. The root cause was DNS resolution failures for DynamoDB’s API endpoints, which cascaded across AWS’s interconnected services.

Today, we’re announcing that PagerDuty is now available in AWS QuickSuite through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This means PagerDuty’s incident management capabilities can now connect with the 1,000+ applications and data sources that QuickSuite integrates with, from AWS services to enterprise SaaS platforms, all accessible through natural language.

When AWS’s massive outage struck, it didn’t just take down cloud services, apps, and enterprise platforms. It also knocked out many of the monitoring systems organizations depend on for real-time answers. Observability companies, including Datadog, New Relic, Checkly, Dynatrace, SpeedCurve, and Splunk Observability, lost visibility or functionality precisely when organizations needed them most.