column "It's always DNS" is a long-standing sysadmin saw, and with good reason: a disproportionate number of outages are at their heart DNS issues. And so today, as AWS is still repairing its downed cloud as this article goes to press, it becomes clear that the culprit is once again DNS. But if you or I know this, AWS certainly does.

And so, a quiet suspicion starts to circulate: where have the senior AWS engineers who've been to this dance before gone? And the answer increasingly is that they've left the building — taking decades of hard-won institutional knowledge about how AWS's systems work at scale right along with them.

What happened?

AWS reports that on October 20, at 12:11 AM PDT, it began investigating “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAS

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