On October 20th, LaunchDarkly experienced a significant outage due to failures in the AWS us-east-1 region, affecting many of their services reliant on AWS infrastructure. In contrast, Flagsmith, a competitor, remained unaffected due to its simpler architecture and strategic avoidance of deploying infrastructure in the unstable us-east-1 region. Flagsmith emphasizes a minimalist approach, reducing dependency on complex AWS services, and offers robust data sovereignty options through private cloud or self-hosting solutions, ensuring data remains within specified regions. The blog post highlights the vulnerabilities of complex infrastructure setups like LaunchDarkly's, which exposed them to widespread service disruptions, whereas Flagsmith's architecture, designed for redundancy and simplicity, allowed uninterrupted service even amidst region-specific AWS outages. Flagsmith offers solutions for those affected by such outages, including migration options from LaunchDarkly, and underscores the importance of control and resilience in infrastructure design to prevent future disruptions.