awsFrequently asked questions
The short answers to what people ask us about AWS outages - how to tell if AWS is down, why us-east-1 matters, how we detect incidents, and whether an outage owes you money.
Is AWS down right now?
Check the live answer at the top of our homepage - it re-checks public AWS health data every 60 seconds. If a service is impaired you will see the affected services and regions, plus a link to the full incident timeline.
How do you detect AWS outages?
We continuously poll the official AWS Health Dashboard and combine it with our own independent probes and community signals. When impact is confirmed we open an incident and can email subscribers within a minute or two.
Are you affiliated with Amazon Web Services?
No. AWSDown is an independent monitoring site and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon Web Services. AWS and service names are used only for identification.
Why does a us-east-1 outage break so much of the internet?
us-east-1 (N. Virginia) is AWS’s oldest and largest region, and several global control-plane services are anchored there. When it degrades, services that depend on it - even in other regions - can fail, which is why one us-east-1 event can ripple across the web.
What is the difference between "degraded" and "outage"?
Degraded means elevated errors or latency with partial functionality - many requests still succeed. An outage means a service or region is substantially unavailable. We roll individual service statuses up to a single overall answer.
Which AWS services and regions do you monitor?
We track the major compute, storage, database, networking, and security services (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudFront, Route 53, IAM and more) across the commercial AWS regions worldwide, plus GovCloud (US-West).
How accurate is your status, and how does it compare to AWS?
Our status reflects our own checks plus public AWS health data, so it can differ from - and sometimes lead - AWS’s official dashboard, which is occasionally slow to update. Every incident links back to the official source so you can verify.
Am I owed SLA credits for an AWS outage?
Possibly. AWS service SLAs (for example EC2, RDS, and S3) pay service credits when monthly uptime drops below a threshold. Eligibility depends on the service, the affected region, and your usage. Each of our post-mortems notes likely SLA eligibility.
How do I claim AWS SLA credits after an outage?
Credits are not automatic - you generally have to file a claim with evidence within a window of the incident. Work out what you are owed with the independent AWS SLA credit calculator at cloudslacredit.com, or automate breach detection with Next Signal.
How can I get notified the moment AWS goes down?
Subscribe to free outage alerts. You get one email when an incident is detected - with the affected services and regions - and one when it resolves. You can scope alerts by service, region, and severity.
Where can I read about past AWS outages?
Our /outages archive has detailed post-mortems of major incidents (timeline, root cause, business impact, SLA eligibility), and /incidents is a searchable log of every tracked event, active and resolved.
Do you cover the big historical AWS incidents like the 2017 S3 outage?
Yes. We maintain plain-language post-mortems of landmark events - the February 2017 S3 outage, the December 2021 us-east-1 event, and the October 2025 DynamoDB DNS failure among them - explaining what broke and what it means for your architecture.
Still watching for the next one?
Get a single email the moment an AWS incident is detected - services and regions included.
Get outage alerts