📡 Monitor your APIs — know when they go down before your users do
Better Stack checks uptime every 30 seconds with instant Slack, email & SMS alerts. Free tier available.
Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you
Is AWS Down? How to Check Amazon Web Services Status Right Now
Amazon Web Services powers roughly 33% of the internet. When AWS goes down, millions of apps go with it. Here's how to check AWS status, what to do during an outage, and how to get notified before your users complain.
⚡ Quick AWS Status Check
Check real-time AWS status on APIStatusCheck:
🔧 Recommended Tools
Some AWS issues are ISP or region-specific. A VPN lets you test from different locations and bypass local blocks.
6,400+ servers in 111 countries · 30-day money-back guarantee
Monitor AWS and 100+ APIs with instant email alerts. 14-day free trial.
How to Check if AWS is Down
AWS doesn't have a single "on/off" switch — it's a collection of hundreds of services across 30+ global regions. An "AWS outage" usually means a specific service in a specific region is impacted. Here's where to look:
1. AWS Service Health Dashboard
The official source: health.aws.amazon.com. Shows current status and incident history for every AWS service and region. Color-coded: green = operational, yellow = degraded, red = disruption.
2. AWS Personal Health Dashboard
In your AWS Console under "AWS Health" — shows only the incidents affecting your specific account and resources. More relevant than the global dashboard when you need to know if your services are affected.
3. APIStatusCheck Real-Time Monitor
APIStatusCheck tracks AWS status with automated health checks and aggregates user reports. Useful for a quick pulse before diving into the official dashboard.
4. Twitter/X Search
Search "AWS down" or "us-east-1 down". Engineers and DevOps teams post AWS issues in real time — often before the official dashboard updates. Also check @AWSSupport and @awscloud.
5. Downdetector
downdetector.com/status/amazon-web-services shows user-reported outages with a spike graph. Most useful during major incidents when users are flooding reports.
Monitor the reality, not the dashboard
AWS health dashboards can be slow to update. Better Stack monitors your actual endpoints, giving you the ground truth about your application's availability in real-time.
Try Better Stack Free →Coordinate your AWS outage communications
During a major AWS regional outage, communication is key. Use Buffer to quickly push status updates to your developers and customers across all social platforms.
Try Buffer Free →AWS Outage History: The Biggest Incidents
AWS has an impressive uptime record overall, but its largest outages have caused massive global disruption:
| Date | Region / Service | Duration | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2021 | us-east-1 (multiple services) | ~9 hours | Netflix, Disney+, Slack, Ring, Alexa all disrupted |
| Nov 2020 | us-east-1 (Kinesis) | ~5 hours | CloudWatch, Cognito, Lambda affected; cascading failures |
| Jun 2019 | us-east-1 (EC2, EBS) | ~4 hours | Major e-commerce and SaaS disruptions |
| Feb 2017 | S3 (us-east-1) | ~4 hours | Caused by human error; took down half the internet |
Note: "complete" AWS outages are rare; these typically affect specific services or regions.
What to Do When AWS is Down
Verify it's AWS, not you
Check the AWS Health Dashboard and compare with your own logs. Configuration errors can mimic outage symptoms.
Identify the affected service and region
Not all AWS services will be affected. Determine which specific services your app uses and whether those are listed in the incident.
Activate your incident runbook
Follow pre-defined procedures: notify stakeholders, post a status page update, redirect traffic to a backup region if available.
Monitor AWS status updates
AWS publishes status updates every 30-60 minutes during major incidents. Set a refresh cadence and update your team regularly.
Post-incident: plan for multi-region
If a single-region AWS outage took you down, use this as the business case for multi-region architecture or a secondary cloud provider.
Most Commonly Affected AWS Services
EC2
Compute instances fail to start or become unreachable
S3
File uploads, static sites, and backups fail
RDS
Database connections time out or fail
Lambda
Serverless functions fail to execute
CloudFront
CDN outage affects global content delivery
Route 53
DNS failures cascade to all downstream services
Professional alerting for AWS-dependent apps
Don't wait for a regional outage to crash your business. Better Stack provides instant alerts via SMS, Slack, and PagerDuty the second your AWS resources stop responding.
Try Better Stack Free →How to Get Alerts When AWS Goes Down
Don't rely on your users to report AWS outages. Set up automated monitoring:
Option 1: AWS Health EventBridge
Configure EventBridge rules to send AWS Personal Health Dashboard events to SNS, Slack, or PagerDuty. This is the official AWS-native approach — free to set up, captures events specific to your account.
Option 2: Better Stack Monitoring
Better Stack monitors your actual endpoints (not just AWS's self-reported status), so you know your app is impacted — not just that AWS has "some service degradation." Alerts via email, SMS, Slack, PagerDuty, and more. Free tier available.
Option 3: Alert Pro
Alert Pro monitors 100+ APIs and services including AWS, with instant email alerts when status changes. Set it once, get notified automatically.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I check if AWS is down right now?
Visit health.aws.amazon.com for the official AWS Service Health Dashboard, or check APIStatusCheck for a simplified real-time view. Twitter search for "AWS down" is also useful during major incidents.
Why is AWS down so often?
AWS rarely has complete global outages — incidents typically affect specific services in specific regions. us-east-1 is the most historically impacted region. The perception of frequent outages comes from how many companies depend on AWS.
Which AWS region goes down most often?
us-east-1 (N. Virginia) has historically experienced the most incidents. Best practice is to architect applications for multi-region resilience.
How long do AWS outages typically last?
Minor disruptions: 1-3 hours. Major regional outages: 4-12 hours. The December 2021 outage lasted ~9 hours.
What should I do if AWS is down?
Verify it's AWS (not your config), identify affected service/region, activate your runbook, notify stakeholders, and monitor AWS status updates. Post-incident: plan multi-region architecture.
Related Status Pages
Alert Pro
14-day free trialStop checking — get alerted instantly
Next time AWS goes down, you'll know in under 60 seconds — not when your users start complaining.
- Email alerts for AWS + 9 more APIs
- $0 due today for trial
- Cancel anytime — $9/mo after trial
🌐 Can't Access AWS?
If AWS is working for others but not for you, it might be an ISP or regional issue. A VPN can help bypass network-level blocks and routing problems.
Troubleshoot with a VPN
Connect from a different region to test if the issue is local to your network. Also protects your connection on public Wi-Fi.
Try NordVPN — 30-Day Money-Back GuaranteeSecure Your AWS Account
Service outages are a common time for phishing attacks. Use a password manager to keep unique, strong passwords for every account.
Try NordPass — Free Password Manager⏳ While You Wait — Try These Alternatives
🛠 Tools We Use & Recommend
Tested across our own infrastructure monitoring 200+ APIs daily
Uptime Monitoring & Incident Management
Used by 100,000+ websites
Monitors your APIs every 30 seconds. Instant alerts via Slack, email, SMS, and phone calls when something goes down.
“We use Better Stack to monitor every API on this site. It caught 23 outages last month before users reported them.”
Secrets Management & Developer Security
Trusted by 150,000+ businesses
Manage API keys, database passwords, and service tokens with CLI integration and automatic rotation.
“After covering dozens of outages caused by leaked credentials, we recommend every team use a secrets manager.”
SEO & Site Performance Monitoring
Used by 10M+ marketers
Track your site health, uptime, search rankings, and competitor movements from one dashboard.
“We use SEMrush to track how our API status pages rank and catch site health issues early.”