Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When the internet goes down, our primary job is to help everyone get back up, as fast as possible. Of the almost half a million incidents we've helped our customers solve, there are some which stand out for both their scale and impact. One of these happened on Monday, October 20, when AWS had a widely covered major outage in their us-east-1 region, from 07:11 to 10:53 UTC. We’re hosted in multiple regions of Google Cloud and so the majority of our product was unaffected by the outage.

When your company has multiple offices or operational sites – whether that’s across the U.S. or around the world – getting alerts to the right team isn’t as easy as just checking who’s on duty. Events can come from a wide range of sources tied to different physical locations, time zones, or even separate departments, and not every alert is meant for every team. Let’s say your company has operations in New York, Dallas, and San Francisco.

As the witching hour approaches, your data center hums quietly – servers glowing like jack-o’-lanterns in the dark. Everything seems calm… until suddenly, your phone lights up with a chilling alert. CPU usage is spiking. Network latency is haunting your system. The ghost of downtime lurks nearby. Welcome to the spooky world of IT alerting – where nightmares come true if your team isn’t ready.

Modern applications depend on dozens of external cloud platforms, APIs, and SaaS services to function. But when those providers experience issues, engineers often spend valuable time asking a basic question: Is the problem with us or with them? Provider-maintained status pages are often slow to update, leaving teams waiting for confirmation while incidents escalate. This delay wastes valuable time, prolongs investigations, and risks customer trust.

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.

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.

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.

We published the first report showcasing the business value of the BigPanda platform, based on both quantitative and qualitative feedback from more than 20 enterprise customers. The Business Value of the BigPanda Platform report provides tangible insights into our platform’s impact on business outcomes.