AWS Status: How to Check Amazon Web Services Status Right Now (2026)
Updated June 2026 · 7 min read · By API Status Check
Quick Answer: Check AWS Status Now
AWS is the world's largest cloud provider, running a significant fraction of the internet's infrastructure. When AWS goes down — even partially — it can take down apps, APIs, databases, and entire SaaS products simultaneously. Understanding exactly how to check AWS status is critical for any team running production infrastructure on AWS.
⚠️ Important: The AWS Health Dashboard is notoriously slow to update. AWS often uses understated language like "increased error rates" or "degraded performance" during events that are full outages for many customers. Always check your specific region and service — and use independent monitoring.
Understanding the AWS Health Dashboard
AWS operates the AWS Health Dashboard — its official status page. Unlike simpler status pages, the AWS dashboard is organized by service AND region, because AWS outages are almost always regional. A failure in us-east-1 doesn't affect eu-west-1.
Key AWS Regions to Watch
us-east-1 (N. Virginia)
AWS's primary region and the default for most services. Hosts the largest share of AWS infrastructure — when us-east-1 goes down, it's the biggest AWS outage.
us-east-2 (Ohio)
Secondary US East region. Many companies use this as a backup or for data residency.
us-west-2 (Oregon)
Primary US West region. Common for west coast companies and gaming workloads.
eu-west-1 (Ireland)
Primary Europe region. Most European workloads run here.
eu-central-1 (Frankfurt)
German data center — GDPR-focused workloads often use this.
ap-southeast-1 (Singapore)
Primary Asia Pacific hub. Southeast Asia and Australia traffic often routes here.
ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo)
Primary Japan region. Many gaming and Japanese enterprise workloads.
Global (IAM, Route53, CloudFront)
Some AWS services are global, not regional. IAM, Route53, and CloudFront issues affect all regions simultaneously.
Most Critical AWS Services to Monitor
EC2
Virtual servers. EC2 issues affect everything running on instances — apps, databases, load balancers.
S3
Object storage. S3 issues break file uploads, static sites, media delivery, and any service using S3 as a backend.
RDS
Managed databases. RDS issues can take down your entire database — the most critical AWS service for most web apps.
Lambda
Serverless functions. Lambda issues break event-driven architectures and serverless APIs.
CloudFront
AWS's CDN. CloudFront issues slow or break content delivery globally — affects static sites and media streaming.
Route53
DNS service. Route53 issues prevent domain resolution — possibly the worst outage type since it breaks all routing.
ELB / ALB
Load balancers. ELB issues mean traffic can't reach your EC2 instances even if those instances are healthy.
DynamoDB
NoSQL database. DynamoDB is used by many high-scale applications; latency spikes here cascade to app timeouts.
What AWS Status Colors Mean
Monitor your AWS-hosted services independently
Don't rely solely on the AWS Health Dashboard — it lags during real incidents. Better Stack monitors your actual endpoints and alerts you the moment your app goes down, regardless of what AWS's status page shows. Free plan available.
Try Better Stack Free →How to Check AWS Status (5 Methods)
AWS Health Dashboard — Service Health (Public)
The public AWS status page at health.aws.amazon.com/health/status. Shows all services across all regions. Filter by region and service to find relevant events. Updated by AWS during incidents — can lag 30–60 minutes.
Open AWS Health Dashboard →AWS Personal Health Dashboard (Your Account)
Requires AWS account login. Shows health events specifically affecting your account, your resources, and your regions. Much more actionable than the public dashboard — you'll see events that don't show up publicly.
Open Personal Health Dashboard →API Status Check (Independent)
Independent third-party monitoring that checks AWS endpoints separately from AWS's own reporting. Useful for confirming whether issues are affecting external access to your services.
Check independent AWS status →@AWSSupport on X (Real-Time)
AWS's support account posts incident updates and often posts before the Health Dashboard updates. Search 'AWS down' or 'us-east-1 down' for community reports during suspected outages.
Follow @AWSSupport on X →r/aws on Reddit
When AWS has major incidents, r/aws is often the fastest source of real-world impact reports. Engineers post immediately when services fail — useful for confirming scope before AWS officially acknowledges.
Check r/aws →Notable AWS Outages and What Happened
AWS's Northern Virginia region had multiple outages affecting Amazon.com, Netflix, Disney+, Slack, and thousands of SaaS products. Root cause: Kinesis service issue cascaded into internal AWS tooling including the Health Dashboard itself — meaning the status page went down during the outage.
💡 Lesson: The status page can fail during an outage. Always have independent monitoring.
A Kinesis scaling issue cascaded to IAM, Cognito, CloudWatch, and Lambda — all of which depend on Kinesis internally. Demonstrated how AWS internal dependencies create non-obvious failure modes.
💡 Lesson: AWS services have hidden internal dependencies. IAM issues can break everything.
An S3 outage caused by a typo in a runbook command took down S3 in us-east-1. Because so many AWS services depend on S3, the cascading impact was enormous — including the AWS Health Dashboard itself (which couldn't update status icons).
💡 Lesson: S3 dependency is everywhere. Build for S3 failure even if you think you don't use it directly.
What to Do When AWS Is Down
Immediate Response
- Confirm via AWS Health Dashboard (your region + service)
- Check Personal Health Dashboard for account-specific events
- Check @AWSSupport and r/aws for real-time reports
- Post status to your own status page immediately
- Alert your on-call team and stakeholders
Multi-Region Mitigation
- If multi-region: fail over to secondary region via Route53
- Enable read replicas in a secondary region for RDS
- CloudFront cache can serve static content during origin failures
- Consider Circuit Breaker patterns for Lambda/API calls
- Have runbooks ready — incidents are not the time to plan
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the official AWS status page?
The official AWS status page is the AWS Health Dashboard at health.aws.amazon.com/health/status. It shows real-time status for all AWS services across all regions. If you have an AWS account, also check the Personal Health Dashboard at health.aws.amazon.com/health/home — it shows events specifically affecting your account.
Why is my AWS service down but the AWS Health Dashboard shows green?
The AWS Health Dashboard is known to lag 30–60 minutes behind real incidents. AWS also uses conservative language — an event affecting 20% of customers in a region may be listed as 'increased error rates' rather than 'outage'. Always check your specific region and service, and use independent monitoring (like Better Stack or API Status Check) to detect actual endpoint failures before the dashboard updates.
Which AWS regions go down most often?
us-east-1 (Northern Virginia) historically has the most documented incidents, primarily because it's the largest and oldest AWS region with the most traffic and complexity. However, all AWS regions experience incidents. The key is architecting for regional failure — even if rare — with multi-region failover for critical services.
How long do AWS outages usually last?
Minor degraded performance events typically resolve within 30–60 minutes. Major regional events (like the December 2021 us-east-1 outage) can last 4–8+ hours. AWS aims for 99.99% uptime SLAs on individual services — roughly 52 minutes of downtime per year — but individual incidents can significantly exceed that.
How do I get alerts when AWS goes down?
Use AWS EventBridge to subscribe to AWS Health Events and forward them to Slack, PagerDuty, or SNS. You can also enable AWS Chatbot for Slack/Chime notifications. For independent monitoring of your actual endpoints (not just AWS's self-reporting), use Better Stack or similar uptime monitoring — this catches issues faster and gives you visibility AWS's dashboard doesn't.
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