When AWS us-east-1 Fails, Much of the Internet Fails With It
There are cloud outages, and then there are us-east-1 outages. That distinction matters because failures in AWS’s Northern Virginia region rarely feel like ordinary regional incidents. They tend instead to expose something larger and more uncomfortable: too much of the modern internet still behaves as though one place is an acceptable concentration point for infrastructure, control, recovery, and communication. When us-east-1 goes wrong, the problem is not only that workloads fail.