Is AWS down right now?

How to check if AWS is down

Amazon Web Services powers a significant portion of the internet, so when AWS has problems, the blast radius is enormous. The first thing to check is the AWS Service Health Dashboard, which reports the status of every AWS service across all regions.

The tool above checks whether the AWS status page itself is reachable and responding. If it loads quickly with a 200 status, the global infrastructure is likely operating normally. But that doesn't always tell the full story — the status page has historically lagged behind actual incidents by minutes or even hours.

For a more reliable signal, test the specific AWS endpoints your application depends on. If you're running on us-east-1 and calling DynamoDB, test that endpoint directly rather than relying solely on the global dashboard.

Understanding AWS region and service outages

AWS is not a single monolithic system. It's a collection of dozens of independent services running across more than 30 geographic regions. An outage in one region usually doesn't affect others, and a failure in one service (like S3) doesn't necessarily mean another service (like EC2) is impacted — although dependencies between services can create cascading failures.

When people say "AWS is down," they almost always mean a specific service in a specific region is degraded. Major global outages are extremely rare. Understanding this distinction helps you diagnose problems faster: check the service and region your app actually uses, not just the headline.

• Regional outages affect one geographic region (e.g. us-east-1). Your app is only affected if it depends on resources in that region.
• Service-level incidents affect one service (e.g. S3, Lambda) and may span multiple regions, though this is uncommon.
• Availability zone failures affect a single data center within a region. Multi-AZ deployments survive these automatically.

Quick ways to verify AWS issues

When you suspect an AWS problem, don't just check the status page. Use multiple signals to confirm:

• Use this checker to test the AWS status page and your own service endpoints from an external network.
• Check the AWS Personal Health Dashboard in your AWS Console for account-specific issues and notifications.
• Search social media — during large AWS outages, developers on X (Twitter) and Reddit often report issues before the official status page updates.
• Test from another region — if your app works fine from eu-west-1 but fails in us-east-1, you've confirmed a regional issue.

For a systematic approach to diagnosing any API issue, see our step-by-step guide to checking if an API is down.

What to do during an AWS outage

When a confirmed AWS outage hits your application, act quickly but methodically. Panicking or making hasty infrastructure changes can make things worse.

• Communicate with your users — post a status update explaining that a third-party infrastructure issue is affecting your service. Be transparent.
• Activate your failover — if you have multi-region deployments, switch traffic to healthy regions. If you don't, this is a good lesson for next time.
• Enable graceful degradation — disable features that depend on the affected service rather than letting the entire app crash.
• Monitor for recovery — subscribe to the AWS status RSS feed or use this tool to check periodically. Don't switch back until you've confirmed stability for at least 10 minutes.