Is AWS Down? How to Check AWS Status in Real-Time

Quick Answer: To check if AWS is down right now, visit apistatuscheck.com/api/aws for real-time monitoring across all AWS services and regions, or check the official AWS Health Dashboard for service status updates. If you're experiencing issues, verify your specific service (EC2, S3, Lambda) and region, check your application logs, and review AWS status history for ongoing incidents.

How to Check AWS Status in Real-Time

When your application stops responding or you notice performance degradation, the first question is often: "Is AWS down, or is it just me?" Here's how to get an immediate answer:

1. Use API Status Check for Instant Monitoring

API Status Check provides real-time monitoring of AWS services across all regions. Unlike checking status pages manually, you get:

• Real-time uptime data for EC2, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, and other critical services
• Regional breakdowns to identify if outages are localized
• Historical uptime trends to see if issues are recurring
• Automated alerts so you know about problems before your users do

The platform monitors AWS services every minute and maintains a public status page that's faster and more comprehensive than manually checking multiple AWS regions.

2. Check the Official AWS Health Dashboard

AWS maintains two status resources:

• AWS Health Dashboard - Public status for all services and regions
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard - Account-specific notifications (requires AWS login)

The Personal Health Dashboard is particularly valuable because it shows issues that specifically affect your resources, not just general service status.

3. Verify Service-Specific Status

AWS services fail independently. Your EC2 instances might be fine while S3 is experiencing issues. Always check the specific service you're having trouble with:

• Compute: EC2, Lambda, ECS, Fargate
• Storage: S3, EBS, EFS, Glacier
• Database: RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora, ElastiCache
• Networking: CloudFront, Route 53, VPC, API Gateway
• Application: SQS, SNS, SES, EventBridge

Common AWS Outage Patterns and Affected Services

Understanding how AWS services typically fail helps you diagnose issues faster and plan better redundancy.

Regional Cascading Failures

AWS is divided into regions (us-east-1, eu-west-1, etc.), and each region contains multiple availability zones. The most severe outages occur when an entire region experiences problems:

Classic Example - US-EAST-1 Outages: US-East-1 (Virginia) is AWS's largest and oldest region, hosting a disproportionate number of services. When us-east-1 goes down, it often creates a cascading effect because:

• Many AWS control plane APIs run in us-east-1
• Third-party services and monitoring tools often depend on us-east-1
• It hosts critical services like Route 53's health checks

Impact: Even if your application runs in us-west-2, a us-east-1 outage can affect your ability to deploy, modify, or monitor resources.

Service-Specific Failure Patterns

S3 (Simple Storage Service):

• Most common issue: API slowdowns rather than complete failures
• Symptoms: Increased latency, 503 errors, failed uploads
• Cascading effect: Many AWS services depend on S3, so S3 issues can break Lambda, EC2 AMIs, CloudFormation templates, etc.

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud):

• Issues typically affect specific instance types or availability zones
• Symptoms: Instance launch failures, degraded performance, connectivity issues
• Impact varies by AZ — properly distributed workloads may only experience partial degradation

Lambda:

• Common issues: Invocation throttling, cold start delays, execution timeouts
• Often regional rather than service-wide
• Dependent on other services (S3, API Gateway) which can create false positives

RDS & DynamoDB:

• Database outages are less frequent but high-impact
• RDS Multi-AZ failovers can cause 60-120 second interruptions
• DynamoDB throttling often looks like an outage but is actually a capacity issue

Route 53:

• Extremely rare failures due to global distribution
• Issues typically affect health checks or DNS query latency rather than resolution
• When Route 53 has problems, a significant portion of the internet is affected

The "Single Availability Zone" Problem

Many developers run entirely within a single AZ to save on data transfer costs. This creates risk: AZ-level failures (which happen several times per year) can take down your entire application. AWS designs for multi-AZ deployments — single-AZ architectures are inherently fragile.

What to Do When AWS is Down

Step 1: Confirm the Issue (Don't Assume It's AWS)

Before blaming AWS, verify:

1. Check your application logs - Are errors AWS-specific (503, timeout) or application bugs?
2. Test from multiple locations - Use multiple networks/devices to rule out local connectivity
3. Verify your AWS credentials - Expired keys or IAM policy changes cause "outage-like" symptoms
4. Check your service quotas - Hitting limits looks identical to service degradation

Step 2: Identify Scope and Impact

Once you've confirmed it's an AWS issue:

• Which service(s) are affected? (EC2, S3, Lambda, etc.)
• Which region(s)? (us-east-1, ap-southeast-2, etc.)
• Which availability zones? (Check AWS console or status page)
• Is it partial degradation or complete failure?

Step 3: Implement Immediate Workarounds

If a specific AZ is down:

• Manually fail over to healthy AZs
• Update load balancer targets to exclude affected AZ
• Launch replacement instances in healthy AZs

If a region is degraded:

• Route traffic to a secondary region (if you have multi-region setup)
• Use CloudFront or Route 53 failover policies to redirect users
• Enable static "status page" mode to reduce backend load

If a service is down:

• Switch to alternative services (S3 → CloudFront cache, DynamoDB → ElastiCache)
• Enable maintenance mode to reduce failed requests
• Use pre-computed/cached data instead of live queries

Step 4: Communicate with Your Users

Transparency builds trust during outages:

1. Update your status page immediately - Don't wait for full details
2. Provide specific information - "S3 in us-east-1 is experiencing issues" beats "We're aware of problems"
3. Give time estimates (if possible) - "AWS estimates 2-hour resolution" helps users plan
4. Post-mortem after resolution - Explain what happened and what you're doing to prevent recurrence

Step 5: Post-Incident Review

After service restores:

• Review AWS's incident report (usually published 24-48 hours later)
• Check your monitoring for early warning signs you missed
• Identify architectural improvements (better redundancy, failover automation)
• Update runbooks with lessons learned
• Consider multi-region or multi-cloud strategies for critical workloads

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does AWS go down?

AWS services are highly reliable, typically maintaining 99.9%+ uptime. However, with hundreds of services across 30+ regions, some service degradation happens weekly. Major outages affecting multiple services or regions occur several times per year. US-East-1 (Virginia) experiences more frequent issues than newer regions due to its size and age.

Can I get compensated for AWS downtime?

Yes, AWS offers Service Level Agreement (SLA) credits if uptime falls below guaranteed thresholds:

• EC2, RDS, Lambda: 99.99% uptime (multi-AZ) or 99.5% (single-AZ)
• S3: 99.9% uptime
• DynamoDB: 99.99% uptime (global tables) or 99.9% (regional)

To claim credits, you must submit a support request within 30 days with evidence of downtime. Credits typically cover 10-25% of affected service costs, not revenue losses or business impact.

What's the difference between AWS Health Dashboard and Personal Health Dashboard?

• AWS Health Dashboard (public): Shows service status for all AWS customers across all regions. Useful for checking if problems are widespread.
• Personal Health Dashboard (account-specific): Shows issues affecting your specific AWS resources. Requires login and provides proactive notifications about maintenance, security issues, and service impacts.

For operational monitoring, you should monitor both — the public dashboard for general awareness and the personal dashboard for account-specific alerts.

Should I build multi-region redundancy?

It depends on your requirements:

Build multi-region if:

• Downtime costs exceed $10,000+ per hour
• You need sub-second global latency
• Regulatory requirements demand data residency in multiple locations
• You're operating at scale where multi-region costs are marginal

Multi-AZ may be sufficient if:

• Your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is 1-2 hours
• Regional failures are acceptable risks
• Cost optimization is a priority
• You're an early-stage startup with limited resources

Most applications should at minimum architect for multi-AZ deployments. Multi-region adds significant complexity and cost, but it's essential for mission-critical applications.

How can I monitor AWS status automatically?

Rather than manually checking status pages, set up automated monitoring:

1. Use API Status Check - Get instant alerts when AWS services go down via email, SMS, or Slack
2. AWS EventBridge + Health API - Configure automated notifications for Personal Health Dashboard events
3. CloudWatch Alarms - Monitor application metrics that indicate AWS issues (high latency, error rates)
4. Third-party monitoring - Services like Datadog, New Relic, or Pingdom can detect AWS degradation

The best approach combines AWS-native monitoring (to detect AWS issues) with external monitoring (to detect when AWS monitoring itself fails).

What causes most AWS outages?

Based on AWS post-incident reports, common causes include:

• Network device failures - Routers, switches, or interconnects failing
• Power issues - Despite redundancy, power systems occasionally fail
• Software bugs - Deployment issues or edge cases in AWS control planes
• Capacity exhaustion - Sudden traffic spikes overwhelming available resources
• Human error - Misconfigurations during maintenance windows
• Cascading failures - One service failure triggering failures in dependent services

AWS publishes detailed post-incident reports for major outages, which are valuable learning resources for understanding complex distributed systems.

Stay Ahead of AWS Outages

Don't wait for your users to tell you AWS is down. API Status Check monitors AWS services 24/7 across all regions and sends instant alerts the moment issues are detected.

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• Real-time monitoring of 100+ APIs including AWS, Stripe, OpenAI, and more
• Instant alerts via email, Slack, or webhook
• Historical uptime data and incident reports
• Public status pages for your team

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