Northern Virginia's Fairfax County public schools have the day off for Diwali, so that's not an unreasonable question.

In my experience, the teams at AWS are pretty diverse, reflecting the diversity in the area. Even if a lot of the Indian employees are taking the day off, there should be plenty of other employees to back them up. A culturally diverse employee base should mitigate against this sort of problem.

If it does turn out that the outage was prolonged due to one or two key engineers being unreachable for the holiday, that's an indictment of AWS for allowing these single points of failure to occur, not for hiring Indians.

It's more worse if caused by American engineers , not on holiday

Seems like a lot of people missing that this post was made around midnight PST time and thus it would be more reasonable to ping people at lunch in IST before waking up people in EST or PST.

More info is claiming the problem started around 9:15 the previous day, but brewed for a while. But that’s still after breakfast in IST.

Sometimes I miss my phone buzzing when doing yard work. Diwali has to be worse for that.

Seeing as how this is us-east-1, probably not a lot.

I believe the implication is that a lot of critical AWS engineers are of Indian descent and are off celebrating today.

junon's implication may be that AWS engineers of Indian descent would tend to be located on the West Coast.

North Virginia has a very large Indian community.

All the schools in the area have days off for Indian Holidays since so many would be out of school otherwise.

This broke in the middle of the day IST did it not? Why would you start waking up people in VA if it’s 3 in the morning there if you don’t have to?

I bet you haven't gotten an email back from AWS support during twilight hours before.

There are 153k Amazon employees based in India according to LinkedIn.

Missing my point entirely.

Then I missed it too because I let my Indian coworkers handle production issues after 9,10pm unless the problem sounds an awful lot like the feature toggle I flipped on in production is setting servers on fire.

My main beef with that team was that we worked on too many stories in parallel so information on brand new work was siloed. Everyone caught up after a bit but stuff we just or hadn’t demoed yet was spotty for coverage.

If I was up at 1 am it was because I had insomnia and figured out exactly what the problem was and it was faster to fix it than to explain. Or if I wake up really early and the problem is still not fixed.