Our October 20 Service Disruption: What Happened, What We Learned and How We’re Improving

On October 20, 2025, LaunchDarkly experienced a significant service disruption due to a major AWS us-east-1 outage, which impacted their feature flag management and delivery systems, along with various other services. The incident unfolded in two phases; the first phase was marked by AWS service degradation affecting LaunchDarkly’s ability to autoscale, leading to instability and non-availability, particularly impacting US-based customers. This was followed by a second phase triggered by an internal change, which inadvertently caused a failure in their flag delivery network, overwhelming the streaming service. In response, LaunchDarkly has implemented several improvements to prevent similar disruptions in the future. These include decoupling their Flag Delivery Network from their feature management application, enhancing SDK behavior to support automatic failover, strengthening multi-region availability, and improving disaster recovery processes. The company is committed to maintaining transparency and reliability, ensuring that such regional outages do not result in prolonged disruptions again.