Built for the Unexpected: Form3's architecture remains resilient amidst AWS outage

On Monday 20th October, AWS experienced a significant outage in its US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region - a vivid reminder of how deeply the modern internet depends on cloud infrastructure. The impact reached far beyond the US: ripple effects were felt globally, including in the UK, where many well-known platforms went dark for hours. 

During the first phase of the disruption, our multi-cloud platform continued to process payments in AWS without any interruption. But the story didn’t end there. 

A few hours later, while AWS continued to recover services, their internal EC2 subsystems became increasingly strained under a surge in internal network traffic, triggering a second phase of major disruption. This impacted backend connectivity in our US environments. For several hours, our East Coast systems in AWS were unable to communicate internally. 

In response, our engineering teams initiated preparations to fail over to GCP - a process designed for our US active/passive architecture. Before the failover completed, AWS restored connectivity, and normal service resumed. 

The incident validated both sides of our resilience approach: our ability to maintain uninterrupted service during a major regional cloud outage, and our readiness to recover quickly if a deeper failure occurs. 

Achieving this resilience required deliberate design decisions. We take a light-touch approach to cloud-specific services, using each provider primarily for compute capacity. The critical technologies our platform relies on are owned, operated, and managed by our engineering teams. This not only enables true portability across clouds but also reduces our exposure when large-scale events - like the AWS outage - occur. 

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the benefits of that approach. When GCP experienced an outage earlier this year, our systems remained unaffected. Outages happen - whether in AWS, GCP, or any other provider - but with the right architecture, they don’t have to become business-critical incidents. 

At Form3, we believe flexibility, control, and resilience aren’t just design goals - they’re the foundation for keeping payments moving when the unexpected happens.