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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.

We're excited to announce that we've expanded the moderation capabilities for Ably Chat by introducing two new moderation providers: Bodyguard, Tisane. This enhancement builds upon our recent launch of Moderation for Ably Chat, designed to ensure safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable chat experiences for all users. With these new providers, you now have greater flexibility when choosing which moderation service best fits the needs of your community.

We’ve all been there: you’re building a chat experience and end up spending way too much time on UI glue - message bubbles, room lists, typing indicators… all before you even get to the good part: real-time logic. So today, we’re launching a set of lightweight, flexible UI components built for React and powered by Ably Chat.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Message Reactions in Ably Chat - a quintessential part of any modern chat experience, now available as a native feature. How message reactions work Each reaction in Ably Chat is defined by a simple string, often a UTF-8 emoji like , but it could also be a tag (:like:) or text (+1). Reactions are aggregated in realtime based on their name.

In-app chat has gone from a nice-to-have to an essential product feature across gaming, SaaS, social, and live streaming apps. While it’s tempting to treat it as “just another feature,” the reality is that building chat touches nearly every layer of your stack - from low-latency delivery and message ordering to presence, typing indicators, moderation. And then there is operating at scale to consider.

This post will walk through the creation of a realtime chat application with Next.js and deploying it to Netlify.

In any chat experience, creating a safe and welcoming environment is just as important as delivering messages in realtime. As online interactions scale, the need for effective moderation becomes essential, not only to protect users, but to maintain trust, foster community, and support healthy growth.