When the Cloud Wobbled, We Stayed Upright: How PredictAP Stayed Available During the AWS Us-East 1 Disruption

Written by David Stifter | Oct 20, 2025 8:34:13 PM

Earlier today, the cloud world hit a major bump: AWS’s US-East-1 region experienced a widespread outage, causing service disruptions across a large swath of the internet (1). Meanwhile, here at PredictAP our platform remained up and accessible, a meaningful milestone for our team, our customers, and our shared commitment to reliability.

What Happened on the AWS Outage

The incident began early Monday, when AWS reported increased error rates and latency in the US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region. According to expert commentary:

DNS resolution and the DynamoDB API endpoint were implicated as root causes (2)
Because many services depend heavily on this region, the effects cascaded widely: major apps, platforms and enterprise systems were impacted (3)
The event exposed how dependent many organizations are on a single region or provider, and how fragile that can make operations (4)

Why PredictAP Stayed Up

Here’s the breakdown of how our team ensured uninterrupted service:

Multi-region/cloud architecture & redundancy
From day one we designed PredictAP with a resilience mindset, not simply “what happens if one server fails” but “what happens if a full region or provider becomes unavailable." We applied principles from lean operations and high-performance organizations around building processes that anticipate failure rather than hope it won’t happen.
Automated health checks and orchestration
We maintain real-time observability and self-healing workflows. When one component or region shows degradation, our orchestration layer triggers fail-over routines, re-routing traffic, spinning up instances, and maintaining state integrity. In other words: we treat failure as inevitable and plan accordingly.
Lean incident processes & team readiness
Our on-call teams train regularly for “site down” style scenarios. We follow lean manufacturing / DevOps principles around continuous improvement: after every incident we do a blameless retrospective, update runbooks and refine automation. Because of that, when the AWS disruption happened (though external) our incident response kicked in immediately.
Customer-facing transparency
While we had no impact, we proactively communicated to our customers: "We’re aware of the AWS outage, we’re unaffected, and we’re monitoring hard." That level of transparency builds trust and aligns with the OKR-driven mindset of “operate with high output and clear accountability."

What This Means For Our Customers

You could continue to rely on PredictAP during a moment when countless other services were unavailable. That means less disruption for your workflows, fewer risk-points, and more confidence that we’re building for resilience and continuity.
It illustrates our strategic commitment: availability is not just a bullet point, it’s a core design principle.
This incident becomes a proof-point in our service differentiator: it isn’t “we hope nothing fails” but “we plan for right-when-something-does fail.”

Going Forward: Our Next Steps in Resilience

Resilience is not a one-time win. To further strengthen our posture:

We’re expanding our test coverage of cross-region failure scenarios, including chaos-engineering style drills (inspired by lean / DevOps practices).
We’re continuing to refine our customer communications and service-level transparency: doing more than “we stayed up” to tell you how and why.
We’re reviewing our dependencies for concentration risk (e.g., a single cloud provider, single region) and exploring multi-cloud strategies where appropriate, per industry best practice.
We’ll publish a full “Post-Incident Review” internally and share relevant portions externally, because continuous learning is integral to high-performance teams (see The Goal and its emphasis on identifying bottlenecks and eliminating them).

Thank You and Acknowledgements

Huge thanks to our Engineering and incident-response teams for executing flawlessly. Thank you to our leadership for prioritizing resilience in budget and architecture decisions. And thank you to our customers for your trust in PredictAP.

Conclusion

Today’s AWS outage could have meant disruption. Instead, it became a moment where PredictAP’s architecture, processes and team proved their mettle. In a world where digital infrastructure can wobble, we stayed upright. And we’ll keep building that way, because reliability, transparency and continuous improvement aren’t optional. They’re the foundation of how we serve you.

References

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