us-east-1 has never been “just another” AWS region.
It’s the bootstrap, the one that has to exist before anything else can exist. When new regions spin up, they don’t rise from nothing; they get power-started from the duct-taped heart of us-east-1.
AWS and Amazon leadership have known for over a decade that this was a ticking bomb. Every post-mortem said the same thing: “We must fix this… later.” But “later” kept getting more expensive, technically, financially, politically.
And inside a company that worships EBITDA, “preventing the next outage” doesn’t generate revenue today. You can’t book avoided pain. You can, however, blame the SDE and TPM staff when it finally breaks.
So here we are again.
There will be pages of “Cause of Error” docs, filled with neatly nested “whys.” None of them will reach the real one, that the failure isn’t in the data center, or the automation, or the networking stack.
It’s in senior executive management.