When your application stops responding and your users start filing tickets, the first thing you do is check the AWS status page. You pull up health.aws.amazon.com, see a wall of green checkmarks, and start questioning your own sanity. Your servers are clearly down. AWS says everything is fine. This happens more often than Amazon would like to admit — and it's exactly why relying on the official AWS status page as your primary monitoring strategy is a mistake.
The AWS Service Health Dashboard has a well-documented history of underreporting and delayed updates during major incidents. During the 2021 us-east-1 outage that took down a significant chunk of the internet — including Amazon's own retail site — the status page itself was affected by the outage it was supposed to be reporting on. If your monitoring strategy begins and ends with refreshing a status page, you'll be the last to know when something breaks.
Why the Official AWS Status Page Isn't Enough
Amazon maintains two status tools: the public AWS Service Health Dashboard (showing all regions and services) and the Personal Health Dashboard (showing events relevant to your specific account). Both have limitations that make them unreliable as your only source of truth.
The public dashboard updates are manually curated by AWS support engineers. Between the time an outage begins and the time a human writes and publishes a status update, 15 to 45 minutes can pass. For a high-traffic application, that's thousands of failed requests and a support inbox overflowing before you even know the root cause is upstream.
The Personal Health Dashboard is better — it surfaces events tied to your specific resources — but it still depends on AWS recognizing and categorizing the issue. Partial degradations, increased error rates, and latency spikes that don't trigger a full incident often go unreported entirely. Your users notice a 3x increase in response times. The dashboard shows nothing.
This isn't a criticism of AWS specifically. Every major cloud provider — Azure, GCP, Cloudflare — has the same incentive structure: status pages are public-facing communications, and acknowledging an outage before it's fully understood carries reputational risk. The result is that official status pages consistently lag behind reality.
How to Check AWS Status Independently
The solution is to verify AWS health from outside AWS. If your monitoring tool runs on the same infrastructure that's failing, it can't reliably tell you about the failure. Independent monitoring means checking from networks and regions that aren't affected by the same outage.
1. Monitor Your Own Endpoints
The most reliable signal that AWS is having problems is your own application behaving abnormally. Instead of monitoring AWS directly, monitor what matters — your API response times, error rates, and availability from multiple geographic locations.
Set up synthetic checks that hit your critical endpoints every 60 seconds from at least three different regions. If your us-east-1 hosted API starts returning 500 errors from monitors in Europe and Asia simultaneously, you have a regional AWS problem regardless of what the status page says. The PinusX Monitor runs checks from multiple global locations at 60-second intervals, so you'll catch degradation within a minute — not after a 30-minute delay from an official status update.
2. Monitor AWS Service Endpoints Directly
AWS services expose health check endpoints that you can monitor independently. A few worth watching:
# S3 health check (returns 200 if healthy)
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
# EC2 metadata endpoint (from within EC2 instances)
http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/
# DynamoDB endpoint (monitor TCP connectivity)
dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:443
# SQS endpoint
sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:443Monitoring these endpoints from outside AWS gives you a direct signal. If S3's health check starts timing out from three independent locations, S3 is down in that region — whether or not the status page acknowledges it.
3. Set Up CloudWatch Alarms for Your Resources
AWS CloudWatch can alert you to degradation in the services you actually use. The key metrics to watch:
# High 5xx error rate on your ALB
aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm \
--alarm-name "ALB-5xx-High" \
--metric-name HTTPCode_ELB_5XX_Count \
--namespace AWS/ApplicationELB \
--statistic Sum \
--period 60 \
--threshold 10 \
--comparison-operator GreaterThanThreshold \
--evaluation-periods 2 \
--alarm-actions arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:ACCOUNT:alerts
# Lambda error rate spike
aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm \
--alarm-name "Lambda-Errors-High" \
--metric-name Errors \
--namespace AWS/Lambda \
--statistic Sum \
--period 300 \
--threshold 5 \
--comparison-operator GreaterThanThreshold \
--evaluation-periods 1 \
--alarm-actions arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:ACCOUNT:alertsCloudWatch runs inside AWS, so it won't help during a total regional outage. But for partial degradations — the kind that don't make the status page — it's your first line of detection. Pair it with external monitoring for complete coverage.
4. Use Third-Party Status Aggregators
Services like Downdetector and IsItDownRightNow aggregate user reports and provide a crowd-sourced signal that often surfaces outages 10-20 minutes before official acknowledgment. They're noisy (false positives happen), but when your own monitoring flags an issue and Downdetector shows a spike in AWS reports at the same time, you can confidently point to an upstream problem.
For a cleaner signal, build your own status page that aggregates your independent monitors. When three out of four regional checks fail simultaneously, auto-publish an incident to your team's status page — no manual triage needed.
What to Do During an AWS Outage
Knowing AWS is down is step one. Here's what to do with that information:
- Don't restart your services. If the underlying infrastructure is degraded, restarting just adds cold-start overhead to an already impaired system. Your instances might not come back up at all if the control plane is affected.
- Check the specific service, not just the region. An EC2 networking issue doesn't affect S3. A DynamoDB throttling event doesn't affect RDS. Identify the exact service and scope before taking action.
- Activate your multi-region failover if you have one. This is the moment that justifies the cost of multi-region architecture. If you don't have failover configured, now isn't the time to improvise — focus on communication instead.
- Communicate early with your users. Post to your status page within 5 minutes of confirmed impact. Say "We're experiencing degraded performance due to an upstream infrastructure issue. We're actively monitoring and will update every 15 minutes." Customers tolerate outages far better when they're informed.
- Document the timeline. Log every data point — when your monitors fired, when you confirmed the issue, when AWS acknowledged it, when service recovered. This post-mortem data is invaluable for justifying your monitoring investment and improving your incident response.
Building a Resilient AWS Monitoring Stack
The pattern that catches AWS outages fastest combines three layers:
- External synthetic monitoring — checks your endpoints from outside AWS every 60 seconds. Catches regional failures and latency degradation before anyone else. PinusX Monitor handles this with multi-region checks, SSL certificate expiry tracking, and instant alerts via email, Slack, or webhook.
- Internal CloudWatch alarms — watches AWS-native metrics for your specific resources. Catches service-specific degradation that external monitors might miss (like DynamoDB throttling or Lambda cold start spikes).
- Crowd-sourced signals — Downdetector reports, Twitter/X mentions, and community forums provide early-warning context. Not reliable alone, but valuable for corroboration.
None of these layers is sufficient on its own. The official AWS status page is layer zero — check it, but verify independently. External monitoring is your ground truth. CloudWatch fills the gaps for internal service metrics. Together, they give you a complete picture within 60 seconds of any disruption.
Stop Refreshing the Status Page
The next time your AWS-hosted application starts throwing errors, don't waste 10 minutes refreshing the status dashboard and hoping for an update. Your monitoring should have already told you something is wrong, triggered an alert, and given your team the data needed to start responding.
Set up PinusX Monitor to check your critical endpoints every 60 seconds from multiple regions. Build a public status page so your customers know what's happening before they have to ask. And when you're debugging the JSON payloads from your monitoring webhooks, the PinusX JSON Formatter processes everything client-side — because the last thing you need during an outage is your debugging tools sending production data to a third-party server.