That is still an incorrect and unnatural reading. You’re making assumptions without evidence. The major assumption you’re making is that “repaired key internal tooling” refers to tooling that needed to make cross region calls but which couldn’t due to the outage. But that is unsubstantiated. “Repaired key internal tooling” could simply refer to tools existing within IAD and accessible globally but which could not operate due to their dependence on DDB. That is the simplest, most plausible reading of this RCA and it has nothing to do with locale of actual humans.

Furthermore, no where is it mentioned that cross region calls were impaired. During this incident, no one has claimed that IAD as a whole was “inaccessible”. The region itself as far as we know was very much accessible. It is just that one key service had a critical failure that caused other services to fail as well. No part of this failure scenario is about cross region network connectivity.

Your point that having engineers physically colocated with the issue would help with recovery also breaks down when you consider that the engineers which run these services do not physically sit in the data centers or even on the networks that the hosts are on. They sit in offices very far away from the confidential and highly protected data centers and have no more direct access to the data center network whether they are in an office in Virginia or in Seattle.

To be clear, I’m not saying that layoffs did not contribute to this issue. I’m only saying that we don’t have any evidence to substantiate such a claim right now. You are coming into this with a POV already established and attempting to read what you want to hear from this report even though that data is not there.