The AWS Outage: How Quintype Maintained Stability Amid a Global Cloud Disruption

On October 20, 2025, the digital infrastructure that powers a large part of the internet was briefly shaken. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud provider, experienced a significant service degradation in its N. Virginia (us-east-1) region, affecting API Gateway, SQS (Simple Queue Service), and ECR (Elastic Container Registry).

Many global applications relying on these components faced downtime or latency spikes. Quintype, which operates its publishing stack on AWS, encountered limited but notable impact across a few internal services.

This post documents what happened, and the steps our DevOps team took to restore and stabilize operations.

At 12:38 PM IST, Quintype’s internal monitoring flagged elevated latency and error rates across a subset of APIs. The issue originated upstream, from AWS services within the us-east-1 region. AWS later confirmed large-scale disruptions in multiple subsystems like API Gateway, SQS, and ECR  at 12:41 PM.

Because these services underpin critical communication and deployment processes, their unavailability cascaded across many hosted workloads worldwide. Quintype’s systems experienced intermittent latency and isolated cache restarts, but no full platform outage. Normal functionality was restored by 2:20 PM IST, with minimal disruption to client newsrooms.

Root Cause in Simple Terms

AWS SQS functions as a message queue and it coordinates asynchronous operations across services. Quintype’s architecture uses SQS to handle cache purge signals, background job queues, and publishing triggers.

When SQS went down, the API caching layer that depends on it failed its health checks and restarted repeatedly. These restarts caused brief API slowdowns, even though the front-end CDN continued to serve cached pages to readers.

The disruption was external, originating from AWS’s internal network, not from Quintype’s codebase or infrastructure misconfiguration. Once AWS restored service health, the dependent components automatically stabilized.

When the outage was detected, the DevOps Team moved through a predefined escalation path within minutes:

1. Freeze on New Deployments
   

   • All deployments through Blackknight (our internal release tool) were paused to prevent partial rollouts or inconsistent image pulls.
     

   • The Kubernetes imagePullPolicy was modified from Always to IfNotPresent, instructing pods to use existing images instead of requesting new ones from remote registries.
     
     

2. Shift to CDN for Caching
   

   • Since the API caching layer was restarting due to its SQS dependency, API caching was temporarily migrated to CDN.
     

   • This shift offloaded API responses to CDN’s edge network, allowing users to continue accessing content despite internal restarts.
     
     

3. Monitor and Verify Service Health
   

   • Continuous API probes confirmed stabilization through CDN.
     

   • Internal dashboards tracked API latency and request success rates until AWS issued recovery notifications.
     
     

4. Controlled Restoration
   

   • After AWS services normalized, the caching layer was reverted from CDN back to internal API cache pods.
     

   • System health checks verified consistent cache purging, webhook recovery, and resumed image uploads.
     
     

These steps ensured that even as AWS resolved its internal issues, Quintype’s clients remained largely unaffected.

Because this was a global, provider-level incident, no fundamental architectural change was required. However, the event offered useful validation and prompted several reinforcements:

• Image Caching Policy Update: Keeping IfNotPresent as the default pull policy reduces dependence on live registry availability during deployments.
  

• Multi-layer Caching Resilience: The quick shift to CDN demonstrated the effectiveness of a hybrid caching strategy internal API caching for freshness and CDN edge for fallback.
  

• Dependency Awareness: Teams re-evaluated how tightly internal components depend on single-region AWS services. Cross-region redundancy for message queues is being reviewed.
  

• Operational Communication: Coordination between monitoring, DevOps, and support teams was immediate. Alert channels were tuned to suppress noise and highlight primary causes during future upstream events.
  

The incident reaffirmed the reliability of the existing redundancy design  even when a major cloud region fails, Quintype’s layered approach keeps publishing operations running.

• Isolation Works: The failure was contained to the API cache pods, preventing escalation to front-end systems. Cached content continued to reach millions of readers.
  

• Preparedness Matters: Established runbooks for deployment freeze and cache migration enabled a rapid response with minimal decision latency.
  

• Monitoring Depth: Internal alerts identified the problem before third-party services did, underscoring the value of maintaining independent observability stacks.
  

• Communication Discipline: Since most newsroom users saw little to no downtime, external notifications were kept limited to internal engineering channels until AWS confirmed restoration.
  

Such practices prevent panic while ensuring technical teams remain fully informed.

Once AWS stabilized the us-east-1 region, Quintype systematically rolled back its temporary configurations:

• The CDN cache was reverted to the standard API cache.
  

• All suspended deployments were resumed after verifying clean image pulls.
  

• Webhooks and image upload processes cleared their message queues and resumed normal operation.
  

End-user experience and editorial publishing metrics confirmed a return to baseline performance. The total partial impact window lasted roughly two hours, from 12:41 PM to 2:20 PM IST.

Global cloud outages remind every SaaS provider  including those powering news media  that dependency risk cannot be eliminated, only mitigated. Even with strong cloud partners, resilience is an internal responsibility.

For publishers, continuity is non-negotiable. A few minutes of unavailability during breaking news can affect both reach and credibility. Ensuring that editorial systems stay operational, regardless of upstream failures, is a key design principle at Quintype.

This incident reinforced that principle: pre-planned contingencies, layered caching, and conservative deployment policies can keep the newsroom running even when the underlying cloud platform faces systemic issues.

The AWS outage of October 20, 2025, was a rare, wide-impact event across the global internet. For Quintype, it resulted in limited and short-lived impact, primarily within internal caching and background processing layers.

Through prompt detection and controlled mitigation, shifting cache responsibilities to CDN, freezing deployments, and relying on locally cached containers our DevOps Team maintained service continuity for editors and readers alike.

The episode served as a live validation of the platform’s architectural safeguards. While AWS’s systems have since returned to normal, we continue to treat every such disruption as an opportunity to strengthen redundancy, refine response processes, and reinforce the reliability expected by the 350-plus newsrooms we serve.