Real-time status check for AWS. See if it's just you or everyone experiencing issues.
Amazon Web Services is the world largest cloud computing platform providing compute, storage, database, and security services.
Category: Cloud | Website: health.aws.amazon.com
ipconfig /flushdns or sudo systemd-resolve --flush-caches.Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's largest cloud computing platform, providing compute (EC2), storage (S3), databases (RDS, DynamoDB), networking (VPC, Route 53), serverless (Lambda), AI/ML services, and 200+ other services across 30+ geographic regions. AWS underpins a substantial fraction of the internet — when AWS has major outages, the impact ripples across many other services that depend on AWS infrastructure.
AWS outages are typically region-specific rather than global — a problem in us-east-1 (Northern Virginia, the largest and most-affected region) does not automatically affect us-west-2 (Oregon) or eu-west-1 (Ireland). However, many companies' architectures depend on us-east-1 being available because of legacy single-region deployments or services that have no regional alternative. The 2017, 2020, and 2021 us-east-1 outages each took down a significant chunk of the internet because of these dependencies.
For status verification: health.aws.amazon.com is the official AWS Service Health Dashboard with per-region per-service status. The @awscloud Twitter account posts updates. AWS Personal Health Dashboard (in the AWS console) shows status filtered to your account's services. For developers: many AWS service APIs have status endpoints that return health information programmatically.
Applications hosted on AWS are affected by AWS service outages. Monitoring AWS status (per-service per-region) plus your application-specific health metrics gives full picture during incidents. Automated alerting on AWS service degradation in your regions helps respond faster.
For critical workloads with multi-region setups, periodic failover testing verifies the failover actually works. Untested failover commonly fails when needed. Schedule quarterly DR drills, simulate regional outage, verify traffic shifts and applications continue working in alternative region.
Multi-region deployment doubles infrastructure costs (or more). For each workload, decide whether the uptime requirement justifies the cost. Not every application needs 99.99% availability; for many, brief regional-outage downtime is acceptable.
Many SaaS vendors run on AWS. When AWS is down, your vendors are also affected. Your contract reliability depends on theirs. Audit critical vendors' AWS region usage and architectural resilience as part of vendor risk management.
Regulated industries (finance, healthcare) often have specific disaster-recovery requirements that translate to multi-region AWS architecture. Document your DR architecture, test it, maintain evidence for compliance audits.
Single-region AWS deployment means single-region failure equals total outage. For critical workloads, multi-region is required for high availability. The architectural complexity is real but unavoidable for resilience.
us-east-1 is the largest, oldest, and most-affected AWS region. Many tutorials default to us-east-1; many engineers do not change the default. Deploying in us-west-2, eu-west-1, or other regions reduces exposure to us-east-1-specific issues.
When AWS is down and your site is on AWS, your status page is also down. Users have no way to find updates. Maintain a status page on infrastructure independent of your AWS deployment.
Multi-region setup without periodic testing usually fails when needed — DNS configurations get stale, replication lags accumulate, applications have hard-coded region references. Test failover quarterly, document procedures.
Most AWS services are regional (S3 bucket, EC2 instance live in a specific region). Some are global (IAM users, Route 53 hosted zones, CloudFront distributions). Outages affect each tier differently. Knowing which services your architecture uses and their regional/global nature determines outage impact.
AWS Service Health Dashboard usually reflects major incidents within minutes. Check there before reporting to AWS support — major outages are already known and being addressed.
aws ec2 describe-instances --region us-east-1 list resources by region. Audit by region: review your CloudFormation/Terraform configs for region settings, IAM access shows which regions have been used.