When Amazon’s cloud catches a cold, the internet sneezes. That’s what happened again this week, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the backbone of much of the modern web — went down for hours, disrupting thousands of sites and apps around the world.
Reports poured in from across Europe and the United States, with users flagging issues in AWS’s eu-west-1 (Ireland) and eu-north-1 (Stockholm) regions, as well as CloudFront, Amazon’s global content delivery network (the service that helps speed up websites).
According to outage tracker DownDetector, reports spiked into the thousands as users found themselves unable to access websites, dashboards, and online tools that rely on Amazon’s cloud.
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| AWS Outage reported |
What Happened This Time
Amazon confirmed on its AWS Health Dashboard that the issue began early Tuesday (U.S. time) in its US-EAST-1 data center region — the same cluster of servers in Virginia that has caused headaches in the past.
Between 9:00 AM and 10:43 PM PDT, AWS engineers observed what they called “increased error rates and latencies” across several core services, including EC2 (virtual servers), ECS (container management), Fargate (serverless containers), and EMR Serverless (a data processing service).
In simpler terms, that means apps trying to launch new server instances or run backend tasks started failing — and because so many global systems depend on US-EAST-1, the effects spread quickly to users in Europe and beyond.
To keep things stable, AWS temporarily “throttled” (slowed down) some operations before gradually restoring service across its zones.
By late Tuesday night, Amazon said it had fully resolved the issue, with “all affected services operating normally.”
Why It Matters
This outage follows a similar event less than two weeks ago, when AWS disruptions knocked out access to major services like Nationwide, Snapchat, Ring, EE, and Sky. For everyday users, it’s a reminder of just how dependent the internet has become on a few major cloud providers. When AWS goes down, it’s not just Amazon that suffers — it’s practically everyone online.
Amazon’s cloud is back up, but this double-header of outages shows that even the world’s biggest cloud can stumble. For developers, businesses, and anyone running online services, it’s a good time to check your failover plans — before the next cloudburst hits.