Navigating the October 20th AWS Outage: How Trinity Audio Maintained 100% Audio Player Uptime

On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services experienced a significant outage affecting their US-EAST-1 region. Like many companies relying on cloud infrastructure, Trinity Audio felt the impact. This post provides a transparent overview of what happened, how our systems performed, and the steps we took to maintain service continuity.

What Happened

Starting around midnight PDT (3:00 AM EST), AWS's US-EAST-1 region began experiencing DNS resolution issues that cascaded into broader service disruptions affecting DynamoDB, EC2, and other critical services. The outage lasted approximately six hours before AWS declared full recovery.

For Trinity Audio, this meant several hours of service interruptions across multiple components of our platform.

System Performance During the AWS Outage

Our audio player - the core of the Trinity Audio experience - maintained 100% uptime throughout the entire incident. Listeners continued to engage with content without interruption. This performance validates our architectural decisions around redundancy and fallback systems.

However, several AWS-dependent services were impacted:

• Content Generation (Amazon Polly): At approximately 3:00 AM EST, Amazon Polly - one of the text-to-speech providers we offer - went down for about 30 minutes. Publishers using Amazon Polly voices were temporarily unable to generate new audio content during this window. We considered switching affected accounts to alternative voice providers, but the service recovered quickly enough that intervention wasn't necessary. Importantly, all previously generated content continued to serve normally, and publishers using our other TTS engines experienced no interruption in content generation.
  

• Ad Delivery: Experienced two separate interruptions - 7:00-7:30 AM EST and 9:00-10:00 AM EST.
  

• Publisher Dashboard & Pulse Player: These services were down for most of the day as AWS services gradually recovered. The situation was compounded by Docker Hub's complete service disruption, which prevented us from pulling container images needed to restore dashboard functionality once AWS infrastructure began recovering.
  

• WordPress Plugin: We identified a bug where certain functionality relied on backend calls that became problematic during the outage. We've already deployed version update that eliminate this dependency, ensuring sites using our plugin won't experience similar issues in future incidents.

Our Response

The engineering and leadership teams immediately established a dedicated coordination channel to monitor AWS status updates, track system recovery, and implement workarounds where possible. Despite Slack itself being partially affected by the outage, we maintained effective communication throughout the incident.

The team worked systematically to:

• Monitor AWS Health Dashboard for real-time updates

• Assess which services could be brought back online as AWS infrastructure recovered

• Identify and deploy fixes for issues exposed by the outage (such as the WordPress plugin dependency)

• Keep internal stakeholders informed of recovery progress

By evening on October 20th, all Trinity Audio services were fully operational.

Looking Ahead

We're conducting a thorough post-incident review focused on:

1. Enhanced Fallback Mechanisms: Strengthening our fallback strategies for critical services

2. Improved Monitoring: Expanding our alerting systems to provide earlier warning of infrastructure dependencies

3. Dependency Mapping: Continuing to identify and eliminate unnecessary single points of failure (as demonstrated by our WordPress plugin fix)

What This Incident Reinforces

Large-scale cloud outages, while rare, highlight the importance of architectural resilience. Our audio player's perfect uptime during this incident demonstrates that thoughtful redundancy planning works. The services that experienced downtime reveal where we have opportunities to further strengthen our infrastructure.

We're grateful to our partners and publishers for their patience during the disruption. Transparency and resilience aren't just technical principles - they're commitments to the people who trust our platform.

If you have questions about how this incident may have affected your implementation, please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team.

-The Trinity Audio Engineering Team