AWS Went Down. I used it as a chance to make my app more resilient

🚨 AWS went down today — and it turned into a chance to make the app start up more responsive if and when a similar outage occurs in the future.

This morning, TestFlight users reported that JollyTango (my real-time audio travel guide) was taking longer than usual to load. Normally, it’s up in just about a second — today, it lingered on the splash screen for quite a bit longer.

After some digging, I discovered that AWS issues had affected one of the third-party services I rely on. The app itself wasn’t broken, but it was waiting too patiently for a timeout to complete before proceeding.

🧩 The Root Cause

A nested helper buried deep inside one of the app’s dependent services was making a synchronous network call during initialization. When AWS slowed down, the app dutifully waited for a response before letting users in. Perfectly logical — but not ideal for user experience.

⚙️ The Fix

I adjusted the initialization logic to load that data asynchronously, allowing the UI to render instantly while background tasks complete silently:

await thirdPartyService.initialize(
apiKey1,
apiKey2,
loadDataAfterLaunch: true, // 👈 the one-line improvement
);

Thankfully, this is now patched before launching the app on October 30th.
Sometimes, a platform outage can be the best kind of stress test. 🛠️

Anyone else turn today’s AWS chaos into a chance to harden their stack?