Faultline

What breaks when AWS goes down?

When AWS us-east-1 goes down, services dependent on its compute, storage, and database infrastructure fail within minutes. In a simulated 4-hour outage across 18 interconnected services, 8 services failed completely, 3 degraded to limited functionality, with an estimated revenue impact of $852,000+. The cascade propagates through databases (RDS), caching (Redis), message queues (SQS), and into critical business services like payment processing, fraud detection, and transaction ledgers.

Use the interactive simulator below to trigger the outage and watch the cascade unfold in real time across the full service dependency graph. No signup required.

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Expected Impact Summary

When this scenario is triggered, the cascade engine traces every dependency path and calculates the full blast radius. Here's what happens to the 18-service infrastructure over 4 hours:

Cascade order: AWS us-east-1 → AWS RDS Primary → AWS S3 Storage → Redis Cache → Message Queue → Core API Gateway → Transaction Ledger → Payment Processing → Fraud Detection → User Account Service → Admin Dashboard

This simulation is powered by Faultline's dependency mapping and cascade analysis engine — the same engine you can use on your own infrastructure. Get early access to map your services, run your own simulations, and identify single points of failure before they cause real outages.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does AWS us-east-1 go down?

AWS us-east-1 has experienced significant outages roughly 2-3 times per year, with major incidents in 2017, 2020, and 2021 causing widespread disruption across the internet.

What is a cascade failure?

A cascade failure occurs when one service goes down and causes dependent services to fail in sequence. Like dominoes — one AWS region failing can take down databases, APIs, and customer-facing applications that depend on it.

How can I prevent AWS outage cascade failures?

Multi-region deployments, cross-cloud failover (e.g., GCP backup), and identifying single points of failure (SPOFs) in your dependency graph are key strategies. Faultline helps you map these before an outage happens.

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