Is AWS Down? How to Check Amazon Web Services Status Right Now

Check current AWS status: statusfield.com/services/aws-north-america

AWS is the backbone of a huge portion of the internet. When it goes down — and it does go down — the ripple effects are enormous. This page will help you figure out if AWS is currently experiencing an outage and what to do about it.

Is AWS Down Right Now?

The fastest way to check: View live AWS status on Statusfield →

Statusfield pulls directly from AWS's status feed and updates every 5 minutes. You'll see the current status for each AWS region and service component — EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, CloudFront, and more.

How to Check AWS Status

There are a few ways to check if AWS is having issues:

1. Statusfield (recommended) statusfield.com/services/aws-north-america gives you a live status feed with historical incident data. You can also set up instant alerts so you're notified the moment anything changes — before your users start complaining.

2. AWS Service Health Dashboard AWS maintains their own status page at status.aws.amazon.com. It's comprehensive but can lag behind actual incidents — AWS has historically been slow to update their own page during major outages.

3. Downdetector Community-reported outages show up fast on Downdetector, but it's noisy and unverified. Good for a quick gut check, not for incident response.

4. Twitter/X Search AWS down or AWS outage — developers are usually the first to report issues in real time. Useful signal, but not structured data.

What Happens When AWS Goes Down?

AWS powers an estimated 30–40% of the internet. A major AWS outage doesn't just take down your app — it takes down everything that depends on AWS infrastructure, including services you'd never expect.

When AWS US-East-1 went down in 2021, it took with it:

• Netflix
• Disney+
• Slack
• Airbnb
• McDonald's app
• Ring doorbells
• Amazon's own warehouse robots

The scary part: many of those services don't run on AWS directly. They use other services that happen to run on AWS. That's a hidden dependency — and it's nearly impossible to anticipate.

AWS Outage History

AWS has had several significant outages over the years:

• October 20, 2025 — AWS US-East region experienced disruptions affecting hundreds of downstream services
• December 7, 2021 — Major AWS US-East-1 outage lasting ~7 hours, affecting a significant portion of the internet
• November 25, 2020 — US-East-1 outage on Thanksgiving affecting Roku, Adobe, and others
• March 2, 2017 — S3 outage caused by a typo in a command that took down a huge portion of the web

One thing these incidents have in common: most affected companies found out from their users, not from AWS.

What To Do During an AWS Outage

Immediately:

1. Check Statusfield and the AWS Service Health Dashboard to confirm it's AWS, not your code
2. Post a status update for your users — silence is worse than bad news
3. Check which specific services and regions are affected — AWS outages are rarely global

If you have a multi-region setup:

• Fail over to an unaffected region if your architecture supports it
• Check that your failover automation is actually working (many teams find out it isn't during an actual outage)

If you're single-region:

• Be transparent with users about the timeline
• Check AWS's incident updates — they post to the Service Health Dashboard and via @AWSCloud on Twitter
• Don't try to "fix" things by restarting instances — wait for AWS to resolve the underlying issue unless you're certain it's your configuration

After it resolves:

• Review your monitoring setup — if you found out from a user, that's a gap
• Consider whether your architecture has single-region dependencies that could be addressed
• Document the incident timeline for your team

Which AWS Services Go Down Most Often?

Based on historical data, these AWS services have the most frequent incidents:

• EC2 — The most-used service, also the most incident-prone
• S3 — Rare but catastrophic when it happens (see: 2017)
• Lambda — Occasional cold-start issues and regional disruptions
• RDS — Database failovers can be slow and impact-heavy
• CloudFront — CDN issues affect front-end availability even when backend is fine
• Route 53 — DNS issues here are instant and widespread

AWS vs. What's Actually Affecting You

Here's something important: when your app goes down during an "AWS outage," it might not actually be AWS core services that are the problem.

Your app might be affected by:

• AWS-dependent SaaS tools — Auth0, Datadog, PagerDuty, and hundreds of others run on AWS
• Your CDN — If you use CloudFront and it's degraded, your frontend goes down
• Third-party APIs — Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid all have AWS dependencies

This is why monitoring just your own infrastructure isn't enough. You need visibility into the entire dependency chain.

Never Be Surprised by an AWS Outage Again

The companies that handle AWS outages best have one thing in common: they know before their users do.

Monitor AWS on Statusfield → and get instant alerts the moment any AWS region or service changes status. Set up Slack, email, or webhook notifications and you'll always be one step ahead.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is AWS down right now? Check the live status at statusfield.com/services/aws-north-america for real-time AWS status updated every 5 minutes.

How do I get alerted when AWS goes down? Sign up for Statusfield and add AWS to your monitored services. You'll receive instant notifications via Slack, email, or PagerDuty when AWS status changes.

How long do AWS outages usually last? Most AWS incidents are resolved within 1–4 hours. Major regional outages (like the 2021 US-East-1 event) can last 5–8 hours. AWS typically posts updates every 30–60 minutes during active incidents.

Which AWS region goes down most often? US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) is AWS's oldest and largest region and historically has the most frequent incidents. If you're highly availability-sensitive, consider multi-region deployments.

Why does AWS going down affect services that don't use AWS? Many SaaS products and third-party services are hosted on AWS, even if they don't advertise it. If your app depends on any of those services, you inherit their AWS dependency. This is called a hidden dependency.

Where can I see AWS outage history? Statusfield tracks historical AWS incidents at statusfield.com/services/aws-north-america. You can also check the AWS Service Health Dashboard for official history.