Is AWS Down? How to Check and What to Do

Your application is throwing errors. API calls are timing out. The AWS console is unresponsive. Deployments are stuck. When AWS has problems, the impact extends far beyond your own infrastructure. Millions of websites, apps, and services depend on Amazon Web Services, and a significant outage can take down a visible portion of the internet.

This guide covers how to check if AWS is down, what typically causes AWS outages, and what to do when Amazon's cloud infrastructure is not cooperating.

How to Check if AWS Is Down

AWS has over 200 services across dozens of regions. An "AWS outage" can mean anything from a single service in one region having degraded performance to a global incident affecting core infrastructure. Checking status requires understanding which services and regions matter to you.

Check the AWS Service Health Dashboard

The official AWS Service Health Dashboard shows the status of every AWS service in every region. Green checkmarks mean operational. Yellow or red indicators mean trouble.

The dashboard is organized by service and region. If your application runs on EC2 in us-east-1 and uses RDS in the same region, check those specific rows. An S3 outage in ap-southeast-1 will not affect your us-east-1 deployment.

One important caveat: the AWS status page has historically been slow to acknowledge problems. During the December 2021 us-east-1 outage, the dashboard itself was affected and took time to reflect the actual state of services. If your monitoring shows problems but the dashboard is green, the dashboard may be lagging.

Use the AWS Personal Health Dashboard

If you have an AWS account, the Personal Health Dashboard (inside the AWS console) shows events that specifically affect your resources. This is more useful than the public dashboard because it filters out noise from regions and services you do not use.

Access it through the AWS console under "Health" in the top navigation bar. It shows scheduled maintenance, operational issues, and notifications relevant to your specific account and resources.

Use Is That Down

Is That Down monitors the AWS status page automatically and sends you an alert the moment an incident is reported. This is faster than manually refreshing the health dashboard and catches issues even when you are not actively watching. For a broader look at checking any service's status, see our guide on how to check if a service is down.

Check Third-Party Outage Trackers

Downdetector collects user reports for AWS and displays a real-time graph. A spike in reports is a strong signal, though Downdetector's AWS data is noisier than for consumer services because most AWS users are technical teams who may not submit reports to Downdetector.

ThousandEyes (now part of Cisco) provides internet-wide visibility into cloud provider performance. If your organization has access, it offers detailed routing and latency data that can confirm AWS issues.

Check Social Media and Community Sources

Search "aws down" or "aws outage" on Twitter/X and sort by recent. AWS outages surface fast because so many developers and DevOps teams post about them in real time.

The r/aws subreddit and Hacker News are both valuable during AWS incidents. Technical users post detailed observations about which services and regions are affected, often before the official dashboard updates.

Monitor Your Own Services

The most reliable way to know if AWS is affecting you is to monitor your own applications. If your uptime monitoring shows errors, your APM tool shows elevated latency, and your error tracking shows spikes, something is wrong. Cross-referencing your own monitoring with the AWS dashboard quickly tells you whether the problem is your code or AWS.

Common Causes of AWS Outages

Networking Issues

AWS's internal networking connects services, availability zones, and regions. Networking problems can cascade in unexpected ways. A routing issue in one availability zone can cause timeouts for services in other zones that depend on cross-zone communication. The December 2021 us-east-1 outage was caused by an automated scaling event that triggered network congestion, which then cascaded across multiple services.

Service-Specific Failures

Individual AWS services can fail independently. An S3 outage does not necessarily mean EC2 is down. An RDS issue does not imply Lambda is affected. AWS operates each service with its own infrastructure and team, so failures are often isolated to specific services.

The most impactful service failures tend to be in foundational services that other services depend on: IAM (authentication and authorization), S3 (storage), Route 53 (DNS), and the internal metadata service. When these fail, the blast radius is large.

Regional Failures

AWS operates regions around the world, each containing multiple availability zones. A regional failure affects all services in that region. The us-east-1 region is particularly notable because it is the oldest, most heavily used region and hosts many services that other regions depend on (some AWS services are only available in us-east-1, or use it as a control plane).

Availability Zone Failures

Within a region, individual availability zones can fail. This is the scenario that multi-AZ deployments are designed to survive. If you run your application across multiple availability zones (as AWS strongly recommends), a single AZ failure should not take you offline. If you are running in a single AZ, a failure there takes your entire deployment down.

Capacity Constraints

During periods of high demand (holiday shopping season, large migration events, viral application growth), specific instance types in specific regions can run out of capacity. This does not show as an "outage" on the status page, but it means you cannot launch new instances or scale your existing deployment.

Control Plane vs Data Plane

AWS distinguishes between control plane operations (creating, modifying, deleting resources) and data plane operations (using resources that already exist). During some outages, the control plane is affected but the data plane continues to work. Your existing EC2 instances keep running, but you cannot launch new ones. Your S3 data is accessible, but you cannot create new buckets.

Understanding this distinction helps you assess the impact. If you do not need to make changes to your infrastructure during the outage, a control plane issue may not affect your users at all.

What to Do When AWS Is Down

Assess the Scope

First, figure out exactly what is affected. Check which specific services are showing problems. Check which region. Check whether it is a control plane or data plane issue. This determines your response.

If only one service in one region is affected and your architecture has redundancy, you may not need to do anything. If a foundational service across your primary region is down, you need to activate your incident response plan.

Activate Your Incident Response Plan

If the outage affects your users, execute your vendor outage response playbook. Notify your team, assess user impact, and begin working through your mitigation steps.

Failover to Another Region

If you have a multi-region deployment, route traffic to a healthy region. This is the scenario that multi-region architecture is built for. DNS-based failover (using Route 53 health checks or a third-party DNS provider) can redirect traffic automatically.

If Route 53 itself is the problem, you need a DNS failover mechanism outside of AWS. This is why some organizations use a secondary DNS provider specifically for disaster recovery.

Communicate with Your Users

Let your customers know you are aware of the issue and that it is caused by an upstream provider. Be transparent. Most people understand that cloud provider outages happen. What they do not tolerate is silence. Our incident communication templates provide ready-to-use messaging for this scenario.

Scale Down Non-Critical Services

If the outage is affecting performance but not causing a complete failure, consider scaling down non-critical services to free up resources for critical ones. Pause batch processing, reduce background job frequency, and disable non-essential features to preserve capacity for what matters most.

Document Everything

Record the timeline: when you noticed the problem, what symptoms you observed, what actions you took, and when things recovered. This information is valuable for your post-mortem and for validating your disaster recovery processes.

How to Get Notified About Future AWS Outages

AWS Personal Health Dashboard notifications. Configure Amazon EventBridge rules to trigger notifications (via SNS, Lambda, or other targets) when health events affect your resources. This is the most targeted alerting mechanism.

AWS status page RSS feeds. The public health dashboard offers RSS feeds for individual services and regions. Subscribe to the feeds for the services and regions you depend on.

Automated monitoring tools. Is That Down monitors the AWS status page and sends alerts through email, Slack, or webhooks the moment an issue is detected. This catches problems even when you are not logged into the AWS console. For a full alerting setup guide, see our vendor monitoring guide.

Third-party AWS monitoring. Services like Datadog, New Relic, and PagerDuty can monitor AWS service health alongside your own application metrics, giving you a single view of upstream and downstream issues.

Your own synthetic monitoring. Do not rely solely on AWS's self-reporting. Run synthetic checks against your own application endpoints from locations outside AWS. If your external monitors show failures but AWS says everything is fine, you know there is a problem AWS has not acknowledged yet. Our outage alerts setup guide covers configuring comprehensive alerting.

Recent Notable AWS Outages

December 2021 us-east-1 Major Outage

In December 2021, AWS experienced one of its most significant outages. The us-east-1 region suffered a cascading failure that started with an automated scaling event triggering network congestion. The impact was enormous: the AWS console itself became unresponsive, making it difficult for customers to even assess their own status. Disney+, Venmo, Slack, Roomba, and many other services were affected. The outage lasted roughly 10 hours and led AWS to publish a detailed post-event summary.

June 2023 Lambda and CloudFront Degradation

In June 2023, AWS Lambda and CloudFront experienced degraded performance across multiple regions. Serverless applications saw elevated error rates and increased latency. The incident lasted several hours and highlighted the dependency many modern applications have on Lambda as a compute layer. Applications built entirely on serverless architecture had no fallback compute option during the outage.

References

• AWS Service Health Dashboard - Official real-time status for all AWS services and regions.
• AWS Post-Event Summaries - Detailed post-mortems of major AWS incidents.

Beyond vendor monitoring, consider uptime monitoring for your own services and DNS monitoring to catch infrastructure issues that can look like vendor outages.