Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

For several hours in the day, millions of users were staring at loading screens or frozen apps. Communication channels went quiet. Games, financial platforms, healthcare apps – and even beds – were all down. The culprit this time: an outage in Amazon Web Services' us-east-1 region. AWS is the dominant provider of cloud compute globally, and us-east-1 is its oldest and busiest region. Countless businesses globally depend day-to-day on services hosted in that region.

During this week’s AWS us-east-1 outage, Ably maintained full service continuity with no customer impact. This was our multi-region architecture working exactly as designed; error rates were negligibly low and unchanged throughout. Any additional round trip latency was limited to 12ms, which is below the typical variance in any client-to-endpoint connection, and well below our 40–50ms global median; this is imperceptible to users and below monitoring thresholds.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Annotations in Ably Pub/Sub, a powerful way to enrich your realtime streams with structured, abstracted data. Annotations let you layer context onto messages, from emojis and read receipts to custom tags and beyond. Think of them as stickers of information you can attach to messages, tracking and aggregating them however you need.