Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Reliability lessons from the 2025 AWS DynamoDB outage

On October 19th and 20th, 2025, the AWS region US-EAST-1 suffered a massive outage. What started with a 3-hour Amazon DynamoDB outage from a DNS issue led to an Amazon EC2 outage that lasted an additional 12 hours before normal service was restored. Over the course of the outage, there were over 17 million outage reports as companies like Snapchat, Roblox, Amazon, Reddit, Venmo, and more were impacted.

Scale Chaos Engineering with Automation and AI

Chaos Engineering and Fault Injection testing have been proven to prevent outages, increase availability, and help companies avoid costly downtime. But without the right processes or tools, they require specialized knowledge, a deep understanding of systems, and manual effort for every test. To fully realize the benefits of Chaos Engineering, testing needs to be adopted across all engineering teams without causing a lift or investment that takes away from roadmap progress.

How to test the reliability of a Point of Sale (POS) system

Point of Sale (POS) systems are the backbone of any retail store. A single outage can cost retail companies thousands of dollars each minute in lost sales, and even more if the outage happens during peak hours. If the outage goes on too long, it can cause even more costly damage as customers abandon carts and turn to competitors. In an industry where customer loyalty is worth its weight in gold, that brand damage can end up even more costly than the initial lost sales.