Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Is Northern Virginia Still the Least Reliable AWS Region in 2025? We Analyzed the Data

This updated analysis is based on StatusGator outage data collected from January 1 to December 9, 2025. We decided to review our AWS analysis of outages in 2022 due to several new AWS incidents, especially another widely discussed AWS outage in us-east-1 (N. Virginia) that occurred on October 20, 2025. We’ve expanded the report with fresh 2025 regional data as well as a new breakdown of affected AWS services.

2025: The year of the global cloud outage

StatusGator has been monitoring the world’s cloud services for more than 10 years now. We’ve seen outages, big and small, affect companies of all sizes for more than a decade. Yet as we close out 2025, it feels like the last 12 months brought us some of the biggest outages in the history of the internet. In fact, by our data, this is true! Never before in history have so many huge outages taken down so much of the internet, in such a short time.

Component statuses: Now in the API

The StatusGator API continues to expand with new end points to help support the wide variety of use cases our customers have. We just released two new APIs: In case you missed, it component filtering is one of StatusGator’s most important features, allowing you to filter your service monitor to just the specific products, regions, or features you use. It’s an essential setup step that helps minimize noise.
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Cloud Outages Are Rising: How Early Signals Help IT Teams Respond Faster in 2026

Cloud outages used to be rare, headline-making events. Today, they're part of the daily reality of running digital operations. Whether triggered by a configuration error, network routing issue, API failure, or global infrastructure disruption, cloud incidents now occur frequently, propagate quickly, and affect more services than ever before. In 2025, one trend has become undeniable: Teams that detect cloud outages early experience less downtime, respond faster to incidents, and avoid unnecessary internal chaos.

Microsoft Teams outage on December 19, 2025

On December 19, 2025, Microsoft Teams experienced a performance degradation that affected communication for various users. Despite a significant volume of reports from the community, official health dashboards remained in a normal status throughout the event. This incident serves as a case study for why IT teams benefit from secondary monitoring sources.

Spotify outage on December 17, 2025

On December 15, 2025, Spotify experienced a widespread outage that disrupted playback, logins, and app functionality for users around the world. While Spotify’s official status page remained silent throughout the incident, StatusGator detected the problem early using real user signals and issued an Early Warning Signal within minutes.

What broke during the Trello outage on December 12

In the early hours of December 12, 2025, Trello experienced a disruption that affected teams around the world. Users began reporting that boards would not load, workspaces were inaccessible, and error messages appeared without warning. For a period of time, Trello’s official status page continued to show normal operations, even as real world usage indicated otherwise.

Scrapers Take Down GitHub: December 11 Outage Timeline

On December 11, 2025, GitHub experienced intermittent disruptions that frustrated users across the globe. Developers everywhere started seeing random errors, 503s, unicorns, and CI pipeline failures. Very quickly it became clear something was wrong, even though GitHub’s status page still said ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL. After the incident was over, GitHub published a postmortem that revealed the cause: scrapers. Automated tools hit GitHub with enough traffic to overwhelm key backend systems.

Microsoft Teams outage - December 10th, 2025

On the morning of December 10, 2025, Microsoft Teams experienced a service disruption affecting users across Australia. Although Microsoft 365 users reported issues across several apps, the hardest hit service was Microsoft Teams which became completely unusable for many organizations. While Microsoft did not acknowledge the incident until 03:46 UTC StatusGator identified the issue at 02:52 UTC through incoming outage reports and delivered an Early Warning Signal at 03:01 UTC.

Cloudflare was down again: Here's what happened.

On December 5, 2025, the internet faced another major disruption – the second significant Cloudflare-related outage in just a few weeks. A similar widespread incident occurred on November 18, which we covered in detail in our post The internet broke again – StatusGator can help. Today’s outage reinforces how quickly issues within core internet infrastructure can ripple outward and impact thousands of services simultaneously.

Towards a more resilient StatusGator

Between October 20 and December 5, 2025, a rapid succession of major outages across multiple cloud providers disrupted large portions of the internet. Each of these events affected StatusGator in different ways. After each incident, we implemented improvements to strengthen our reliability. This post summarizes the impact of each outage, the changes made, and the architectural work now underway to ensure StatusGator remains available during the moments when it is needed most.

What Services Are Not Downdetector Alternatives - And Why StatusGator Actually Is

Search for Downdetector alternatives on Google, ask ChatGPT or any AI assistant, and you’ll usually get a list of tools like Datadog, Site24x7, New Relic, Atera, and other monitoring platforms. There’s just one problem: The AI-generated answers continue to lump these monitoring tools together, creating confusion for IT teams and muddying the category. This article exists to set the record straight.

Shopify Cyber Monday outage - December 1, 2025

On December 1, 2025, Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year, Shopify suffered a widespread outage that left many merchants unable to access their stores or process orders. At a time when every minute of uptime translates directly into revenue, the disruption caused immediate concern across the ecommerce community. StatusGator detected the issue within minutes, sending an Early Warning Signal 10 minutes before Shopify published its official acknowledgement.

November 2025 - Early Warning Signals

November brought a steady flow of service disruptions across productivity, finance, developer tools, and major consumer platforms. Two incidents stood out as the month’s most significant: a major Google Workspace outage on November 12 affecting Docs and Sheets globally, and a widespread Cloudflare issue on November 18 that caused cascading failures across multiple services.

Introducing our new service monitor APIs

We’re pleased to announce new enhancements to the StatusGator API platform that make it easier to automate how you monitor third-party services. The new Service Search, Create Service Monitor, and Update Service Monitor endpoints give developers more control over how monitors are created, labeled, and maintained across projects and environments. These APIs are designed for teams that integrate StatusGator into their deployment processes, internal tooling, or infrastructure automation.

New roadmap & feature request hub

We’re excited to announce that StatusGator has officially moved to a new platform for collecting feature requests, organizing our roadmap, and keeping you updated on what we’re building. This new system makes it easier than ever to share ideas, vote on improvements, and follow the progress of the features that matter most to you.

Incident IQ: Outage announcement bar

Our Incident IQ integration just got better. Meet the Outage Announcement Bar, a simple way to surface live outage details inside Incident IQ. This new feature makes it even easier for users, support teams, and administrators to stay aware of service disruptions the moment they happen. This update builds on our existing Incident IQ integration, which already syncs outage reports from your StatusGator status page into Incident IQ.