📩 No Cloud Access? No Email Access.

If your sends looked off Monday morning - low delivery, strange delays, weird revenue gaps - you weren’t imagining it.

A major Amazon Web Services outage in US-EAST-1, the N. Virginia region, triggered DNS and networking problems that rippled across dozens of tools, from ESPs and ad servers to ecommerce integrations. By Monday evening, AWS said service was restored. The damage for many senders had already landed.

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What actually happened

Around 3 a.m. ET on Monday, Oct 20, AWS’s internal health monitoring glitched and corrupted how Network Load Balancers and DNS resolution handled requests.
Translation: anything leaning on Lambda, SQS, EC2, or their APIs started acting unpredictable.

If your ESP, webhook, or automation stack sits inside that region, you felt it. Platforms hit included:

• Outlook

• Amazon SES

• Klaviyo

• Iterable

• LiveIntent

• Mailchimp

• ActiveCampaign

And plenty more that ride the same AWS backbone.

How it hit senders

The outage landed during a prime deliverability window, the pre-dawn slot many newsletters use for morning placement.

• Amazon SES sends weren’t received.

• Klaviyo reported provider outages from roughly 2:50 to 5:30 a.m. ET. Campaigns queued, automations froze, attribution lagged.

• ActiveCampaign, Iterable, and Mailchimp did not post detailed updates, but users widely reported failed sends, blocked webhooks, and login errors.

Some Monday morning sends never happened. Others went out hours late. That lag does more than dent metrics. It dents reputation. Late bursts can trigger throttling, raise false complaint rates, and pull your inbox placement down for days.

The monetization fallout

Deliverability stumbled, and ad tech face-planted right after.

• Ad calls timed out across exchanges.

• Newsletter ad slots rendered blank.

• Tracking pixels failed to fire.

• DNS and API interruptions broke frequency caps and analytics pipelines.

Fewer rendered impressions meant lower CPMs. Oct 20 reporting likely miscounted clicks and revenue. If you saw underfilled ads, missing conversions, or nonsense dashboards, this is why.

Why one AWS region can bend the internet

US-EAST-1 is the oldest and most interconnected AWS region. A lot of control planes, DNS resolvers, and legacy paths still anchor there. When its health layer wobbles, dependent systems self-throttle or error out. Think multi-car pileup on a narrow highway. Centralization is cheap, until it is not.

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What to do right now

1. Re-send critical campaigns
   Pull non-opens or undelivered contacts from the early Oct 20 window. Use a fresh subject line. Stagger the resend to avoid spikes.

2. Rebuild broken automations
   Triggered flows tied to Shopify, Stripe, or custom webhooks may have silently failed. Add time-based fallbacks and fill the gaps.

3. Reconcile attribution and revenue
   Expect delayed unsub, click, and conversion logs. Re-run Oct 20 to Oct 21 once your ESP finishes syncing.

4. Fix ad fallbacks
   If you saw blank slots, add house-ad defaults and caching. Set firm request timeouts. Check UTM and tracking tags before the next flight.

How to prepare for the next one

• Go multi-region
  If your ESP or provider supports it, spread delivery across regions, even at a higher cost. We run four newsletters on Amazon SES spread across us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-1, and us-west-2. During the outage, we lost about 25 percent of revenue instead of all of it.

• Use retry logic and idempotency keys
  Every webhook and API call should retry gracefully after timeouts. Prevent duplicates with ids your systems respect.

• Keep a warm backup ESP
  Stand up a separate IP and domain for failsafe sends, like alerts and confirmations. Test it monthly.

• Add ad-tech timeouts and cached fallbacks
  Hard limits around 5 to 8 seconds reduce blank inventory. Cache creative where you can.

• Monitor externally
  Use uptime and synthetic checks that do not rely on the same AWS region you run on.

• Document the runbook and drill it
  Who pauses flows. Who triggers resends. Who posts the status note. Run a short test every quarter.

Final thought

Monday’s outage was not a blip. One region’s bad morning disrupted deliverability, broke automations, skewed analytics, and wiped out ad revenue across the ecosystem. If you are scaling email, build for disruption. Redundancy in the sending stack. Visibility in monitoring. Graceful fallbacks when the cloud goes dark. AWS will not warn you. It will just pull the plug.

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