In recent weeks, organizations have been reminded that even the world’s most trusted cloud platforms can experience disruption. When those moments occur, the true measure of a security provider isn’t how they perform on a normal day; it’s how they continue protecting customers when the unexpected happens.
No system is perfect. We know some customers experienced delays, and we take that disruption seriously. The real measure of strength lies in how we prepare, respond, and recover. Too often, resilience only becomes a topic of conversation when it’s in the news—when everyone suddenly finds themselves in the same boat. But for us, it’s been a top priority, especially throughout 2025. We’ve learned from our own experiences, which have made us stronger and more focused on what truly matters. That commitment is reflected in our 99.999% service uptime, a direct result of continuous investment in resilient design.
Resilience is not a feature—it’s part of our DNA
At Proofpoint, resilience isn’t a box we check or an afterthought we revisit after an outage. It’s something woven into our engineering culture and architecture. We assume that cloud disruptions will happen, and we build for that reality every single day.
When an AWS outage temporarily took down portions of the internet last week, Proofpoint’s systems continued protecting customers with minimal disruption. We stayed online, scanning billions of emails and blocking threat actors who never take a break.
That continuity didn’t happen by chance. It’s the outcome of years of deliberate architectural decisions designed to reduce single points of failure and maintain continuity of protection even when critical third-party infrastructure fails.
Our resilience strategy is built on years of engineering refinement and operational experience, some of the primary principles that ensured resilience during this incident included:
- Multiple regions. We distribute services geographically to avoid concentration risk.
- Multiple cloud providers. We architect across platforms to reduce dependency on any single vendor.
- Asynchronous technology. We design for graceful degradation rather than hard failure.
1. Multiple regions: keep mail flowing and prevent downtime
When AWS us-east-1 experienced widespread disruption last week, many organizations saw critical services grind to a halt. Proofpoint customers did not.
That’s because our protection infrastructure isn’t confined to a single AWS region or availability zone. We operate in multiple regions across continents and additional cloud environments that provide geographic diversity.
Our European infrastructure, for instance, was unaffected by the AWS event. Because we design regional separation into our systems, services in one geography can continue running independently when another region experiences issues.
This regional diversity doesn’t just prevent outages. It also maintains performance, reduces latency for global customers, and supports compliance with regional data-sovereignty requirements. It’s a principle that benefits resilience, security, and privacy all at once.
2. Multiple cloud providers: improves uptime and secure message delivery
In an increasingly cloud-centric world, many providers consolidate their workloads on a single cloud platform. While that can simplify deployment, it also concentrates risk. If that provider experiences an outage, every dependent service goes down with it.
Proofpoint takes a different approach by operating across multiple cloud providers. This hybrid strategy enables us to take advantage of each platform’s strengths while ensuring redundancy at the provider level.
If one cloud platform becomes unavailable, our systems dynamically reroute workloads through alternative infrastructure. That flexibility not only preserves uptime but also shields customers from the cascading effects of third-party outages.
3. Asynchronous technology: ensuring emails aren't lost or exposed
Even with redundancy across clouds and regions, some shared services can still be impacted when a provider experiences a significant failure. The difference lies in how those services behave under stress.
Proofpoint employs an asynchronous processing model for critical functions. That means if a service temporarily goes offline due to a dependency on an affected AWS region, it doesn’t cause the entire protection pipeline to fail. Instead, messages queue safely until the service comes back online, at which point they are processed in order. This asynchronous approach ensures that no messages are lost, and that security efficacy remains intact. In practice, that means temporary delays, not permanent failures.
Proofpoint in action: what customers experienced
During the AWS outage, Proofpoint customers continued to see safe, reliable mail flow. For our secure email gateway (SEG) customers, there was no interruption to mail delivery thanks to our distributed mail flow infrastructure. The systems responsible for routing, filtering, and delivering mail operated independently of the impacted AWS region.
A subset of customers saw temporary delays in message processing functionality. Those systems resumed normal operation automatically once upstream services recovered, and no malicious emails bypassed our protections. We know that even brief interruptions cause frustration, and we’ve used this event to further harden our systems
Designing for continuity, not perfection
It’s easy to assume that resilience means total immunity from failure, but in distributed systems, perfection is neither realistic nor desirable. What matters most is graceful degradation, the ability to maintain core functionality even when individual components experience disruption.
At Proofpoint, we define resilience not by whether an event occurs, but by how we continue to protect customers when it does. Our teams continuously simulate failures and stress-test infrastructure under realistic conditions. We don’t wait for the next outage to discover weaknesses; we find and fix them proactively.
That operational mindset combined with decades of experience operating one of the world’s largest email security platforms is why Proofpoint delivers consistent uptime and unwavering protection, even when the broader internet shakes.
