Amazon Web Services is the world's leading cloud infrastructure platform, commanding over 31% of the global cloud market. AWS provides more than 200 fully featured services from data centers across 33 geographic regions. Millions of organizations — from startups to enterprises and government agencies — depend on AWS for compute (EC2), storage (S3), serverless (Lambda), content delivery (CloudFront), and hundreds of other managed services that form the foundation of modern internet infrastructure.
AWS outages most frequently originate from regional infrastructure failures, particularly in the us-east-1 region which hosts a disproportionate share of global workloads. S3 bucket availability issues cascade into dependent services since hundreds of AWS and third-party services rely on S3 internally. Lambda cold start spikes, EC2 capacity constraints during demand surges, and IAM authentication storms during certificate rotations are also common root causes.
AWS outages create cascading failures across the internet because thousands of SaaS products, websites, and mobile apps run on AWS infrastructure. When S3 goes down, image loading breaks across the web. EC2 outages can take down entire companies. Lambda failures halt serverless applications. Even services not directly on AWS may be affected through downstream dependencies on AWS-hosted APIs and databases.
Use this page to check AWS availability in real time. AWS has dozens of independent services across multiple regions, so outages often affect specific services or regions rather than the entire platform. Check health.aws.amazon.com for the official AWS Service Health Dashboard with region-specific status.
AWS outages typically result from regional infrastructure failures, power issues at specific data centers, networking problems between availability zones, or software bugs in core services. The us-east-1 region in Northern Virginia experiences the most noticeable outages because it hosts a disproportionate share of the internet's infrastructure.
AWS hosts approximately 31% of the world's cloud workloads. When AWS goes down, thousands of websites, apps, and SaaS products experience outages simultaneously. Major companies like Netflix, Airbnb, and Slack all run on AWS, so their services may be disrupted. S3 outages are particularly impactful because many services use S3 for static asset storage.
Check the AWS Health Dashboard at health.aws.amazon.com to identify which specific services and regions are affected. If you have multi-region deployments, failover to healthy regions. For S3 outages, serve cached content. Consider setting up AWS Health alerts in your AWS console and external monitoring through PinusX for independent verification.
Deploy across multiple AWS availability zones and regions. Use CloudFront for content caching. Implement circuit breakers in your application code. Set up independent monitoring with PinusX Uptime Monitor that checks from outside AWS — relying solely on AWS-hosted monitoring means you won't get alerts when AWS itself is down.
Monitor AWS uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.