BREAKING: SendGrid AWS us-west-2 DNS Issues — Immediate Workarounds Inside

SendGrid experiencing AWS us-west-2 DNS health check failures. Impact assessment, workarounds, and monitoring guidance for indie hackers.

BREAKING: SendGrid Outage in us-west-2 — What You Need to Know

Status: Monitoring | Updated: Now | Severity: Medium

What's Down & Who's Affected

SendGrid is currently experiencing DNS health check failures in the AWS us-west-2 region. This primarily impacts:

Users with SendGrid infrastructure routed through us-west-2

Applications sending transactional emails (password resets, confirmations, receipts)

Webhook delivery to us-west-2 endpoints

Some API calls to SendGrid's us-west-2 infrastructure

Not all users are affected. If your application routes through other AWS regions (us-east-1, eu-west-1, etc.) or uses non-AWS SendGrid endpoints, you may see no disruption.

Immediate Workarounds (Do This Now)

1. Route Traffic to Alternative Regions

If you control DNS or API endpoints: ```

Switch API calls to SendGrid's global load balancer (api.sendgrid.com)

Avoid region-specific endpoints temporarily

Let SendGrid's intelligent routing handle failover

```

2. Enable Retry Logic

If not already in place, implement exponential backoff: ```

Catch 503/timeout errors

Retry after 5s, then 10s, then 30s

Queue emails locally; don't discard

```

3. Queue Emails Locally

Use Redis, RabbitMQ, or even SQLite as temporary buffer

Process queue once SendGrid recovers

Prevents email loss during outage

4. Update Status Page

Notify users immediately if email confirmations fail

Set expectations for resolution time

How to Check If You're Affected

Run these checks:

1. DNS Test: ```bash nslookup sendgrid.net

Check if us-west-2 endpoint resolves

```

2. SendGrid Status Page: - Visit https://status.sendgrid.com (real-time updates) - Check region-specific incidents

3. Test Email Send: ```bash curl -X POST "https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/mail/send" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \ -d '{"personalizations":[{"to":[{"email":"test@example.com"}]}],"from":{"email":"you@example.com"},"subject":"Test","content":[{"type":"text/plain","value":"Test"}]}' ```

4. Check Your Logs: - Search for 503, 504, or DNS timeout errors in last 30 minutes - Correlate with us-west-2 region if applicable

Alternative Email Services (Quick Switch)

If you need redundancy:

Mailgun — similar API, reliable uptime, good for startups

Resend — modern, developer-friendly, excellent for transactional email

AWS SES — cost-effective, integrates with AWS infrastructure

Postmark — premium reliability, better for critical emails

How to Monitor Recovery

1. Watch SendGrid Status: Refresh https://status.sendgrid.com every 5 minutes 2. Monitor Your Metrics: - Email delivery rate (should return to 99%+) - API response times (should drop below 500ms) - Queue depth (should decrease)

3. Set Alerts: - PagerDuty/AlertManager on SendGrid API failures - Track error rates by region

4. Expected Timeline: - DNS issues: typically 15-45 min recovery - SendGrid likely working on fix; expect update within 1 hour

Bottom Line

This is not a widespread outage—it's regional and likely temporary. Your users won't notice if you:

Queue emails locally

Implement retry logic

Monitor recovery

Stay calm. Email will deliver. Monitor and move on.

Keep this thread bookmarked. We'll update as SendGrid reports progress.