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1. IL-0410 SQS Fair Queues rejected valid messages with InvalidParameterValue, failing about half of AssemblyAI's US async requests

   AssemblyAI2026

   Symptoms

   From 20:04 UTC on 16 September 2026 AssemblyAI's US Async API returned elevated server errors. At the peak roughly 50% of async transcription requests on the US endpoint failed, and part of the requests that succeeded took longer than usual to complete.

   High error rateHigh latency

   Trigger

   The AWS SQS Fair Queues feature began rejecting valid messages with InvalidParameterValue because of a change on the AWS side; AWS confirmed a service-side issue.

   Root cause

   Cloud provider outage

   Component

   Message broker

   Contributing factor

   –

   Remediation

   • Disabled Fair Queues across all services and reverted to standard SQS queues

   Action items

   • Move service configuration from environment variables to a global feature flag system so mitigations apply in seconds
   • Add a reviewed break-glass path that lets urgent fixes skip non-essential CI steps
   • Fail the US pipeline over to a second region when a regional provider dependency degrades

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