A cooling failure in an AWS US-EAST-1 data center on May 7, 2026 caused multi-hour outages at Coinbase (~7 hours), FanDuel, and CME Group. The post analyzes what happened, why multi-AZ HA didn't save Coinbase's latency-optimized exchange, and why cloud SLA credits (~10% of compute spend) don't cover real business losses. It distinguishes high availability (zone-level) from disaster recovery (region-level), outlines three actionable steps for assessing cross-region readiness, and introduces SingleStore Smart DR — a cross-region replication service with up to 10-minute RPO and no idle compute cost until failover.
Table of contents
What happened on 7–8 May 2026Who was impactedThe hidden cost: SLA credits versus realityHigh availability and disaster recovery solve different problemsA note to our customersWhat SingleStore Smart DR doesWhere Smart DR stops and your DR plan beginsThree things to do this weekClosingSort: