Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
23 comments
·December 23, 2025yibers
kristianc
I find it funny that we see complaints about why software quality has got worse alongside people advocating to choose objectively risky AWS regions for career risk and blame minimisation reasons.
rconti
Places nobody's ever heard of like "Ohio" or "Oregon"?
Yeah, I'm not worried about being targeted in an RCA and pointedly asked why I chose a region with way better uptime than `us-tirefire-1`.
What _is_ worth considering is whether your more carefully considered region will perform better during an actual outage where some critical AWS resource goes down in Virginia, taking my region with it anyway.
throwawaysleep
This to me was the real lesson of the outage. A us-east-1 outage is treated like bad weather. A regional outage can be blamed on the dev. us-east-1 is too big to get blamed, which is why it should be the region of choice for an employee.
dontdoxxme
Why aren't you using IBM cloud?
throwawaysleep
If IBM still had a good reputation, I probably would.
Forgeties79
They sure wouldn’t get fired
riffic
how about following the well-architected framework and building something with a suitable level of 9s where you can justify your decisions during a blameless postmortem (please stamp your buzzword bingo card for a prize.)
paradox460
We vibe code everything in flavor of the month node frameworks, tyvm, because elixir is too hard to hire for (or some equally inane excuse)
DANmode
I agree with your post conceptually.
However: Don’t underestimate community support (in the areas you’re likely to want it) when comparing development stacks.
thejosh
Bandwidth cost is also another major reason.
nadis
Cackling while reading this visiting my family in Northern Virginia for the holidays. Despite it being a prominent place in the history of the web, it's still the least reliable AWS region (for now).
rayiner
[delayed]
emersonrsantos
[delayed]
noosphr
At 34 hours of downtime that's two nines of uptime
At this point my garage is tied for reliability with us-east-1 largely because it got flooded 8 month ago.
the__alchemist
I don't know if this is still true, or related, but that area used to be (Circa 10-30 years ago) very highly prone to power outages. The reason was lots of old trees near the lines that would inevitably fall; blackouts in local areas were common due to this.
davidfstr
I intentionally avoid using us-east-1 for anything, since I’ve seen so many outages.
temp0826
us-east-1 is often a lynchpin for services worldwide. Something hinky happening to dns or dynamodb in us-east-1 will probably wreck your day regardless of where you set up shop.
arusahni
The sorting for the "Duration" column appears to be lexicographical, not numeric.
david_shaw
Yes, it's the least reliable. Thanks for summarizing the data here to illustrate the issue.
It's often seen as the "standard" or "default" region to use when spinning up new US-based AWS services, is the oldest AWS center, has the most interconnected systems, and likely has the highest average load.
It makes sense that us-east-1 has reliability problems, but I wish Amazon was a little more upfront about some of the risks when choosing that zone.
Forgeties79
Nobody ever got fired for connecting to us-east-1
secondcoming
We get constant resource issues in GCP’s us-east4 region
theturtle
I searched for it, and did not find, the word "backhoe."
Big fail.
I have said for years, never ascribe to terrorism what can be attributed to some backhoe operator in Ashburn, Virginia.
We got a lotta backhoes in northern Virginia.
Ass covering-wise, you are probably better off going down with everyone else on us-east-1. The not so fun alternative: being targeted during an RCA explaining why you chose some random zone no one ever heard of.