Why Does the Internet Keep Breaking? A Deep Dive into AWS US-East-1

We’ve been experimenting with a new style of content on the freeCodeCamp YouTube channel: the video essay. These projects allow us to step back from the code tutorials to explore the massive, complex systems that underpin our digital world.

In our latest video, we cover the recurring, massive outages of AWS’s US-East-1 region.

When the internet goes down, it often feels like a mysterious, singular event. But the history of US-East-1 is a story of compounding complexity. From a network upgrade gone wrong in 2011 to a single missing DNS record in 2025, we trace how one specific data center cluster in Northern Virginia became the unintentional "connective tissue" of the modern web

This is a story about how systems this large don't fail in the ways we predict, they fail in the ways we forget to protect against.

Watch the full video on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel (16-minute watch).

We hope you enjoy this deeper dive. Let us know what you think of this video essay format and what topics you'd like us to explore next.