Executive summary On October 20, 2025, a major outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) US-East-1 (Amazon’s largest and most strategically important cloud region) took down digital services for many major brands, including Netflix, Atlassian, Coinbase, Slack, and Expedia. Engineering teams worldwide found themselves in an impossible position. Their monitoring dashboards showed failing services, and customer support channels flooded with complaints , but the AWS management consoles that they needed to diagnose and remediate the issues were either unreachable or displaying stale data.…