Is Amazon EC2 down?

What Amazon EC2 does - and how it fails

Amazon EC2 is the virtual-server backbone of AWS - when EC2 has problems in a region, almost everything built on top of it (including managed services) can wobble. EC2 incidents usually show up as failed instance launches, unreachable instances in one Availability Zone, or API errors, rather than everything going dark at once.

• Instance launch failures in a single Availability Zone (capacity or control-plane issues)
• Network connectivity impairment for instances in one AZ
• Elevated EC2 API error rates (RunInstances, DescribeInstances) while running instances stay up
• EBS volume degradation making instances slow rather than down

Recent Amazon EC2 incidents

• [RESOLVED] Increased Error Rates

  August 19, 2026 · 3h 32m

  Between August 18 5:00 PM and August 19 11:00 AM PDT, we experienced elevated errors launching EC2 instances in a newly launched Availability Zone (euw2-az4) in the EU-WEST-2 Region. After the new Availability Zone launch, we began experiencing errors when using a default VPC. We discovered the root cause of the issue on August 19 at 9:00 AM and began deploying a change to resolve the issue at 9:30 AM. While the change was underway, we began to see incremental improvements in new instance launches, with full recovery at 11:00 AM. Existing running instances and resources were not affected. Some regional services, such as Lambda functions or Aurora databases, were not available at the launch of the new Availability Zone and service availability will be added over time. Customers attempting to create resources before the services become available will see a message reporting that it is not supported in the Availability Zone. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.

• [RESOLVED] Increased Launch Template API Error Rates

  July 6, 2026 · 2h 8m

  Between 2:56 AM and 6:54 AM PDT, we experienced increased error rates when calling EC2 Launch Template APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. During this time, affected customers may have experienced errors when creating, modifying, or describing Launch Templates. Other AWS services that rely on Launch Templates were also impacted. Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EKS workloads already running on provisioned nodes continued to operate normally. Cluster modification operations, and Managed Node Group creation were also impacted. For EKS Auto Mode, impact was limited to operations requiring new capacity or changes, including node provisioning and pod scheduling. Our engineers were automatically engaged and immediately began investigating the root cause. We identified the root cause as a congestion issue within an EC2 internal subsystem responsible for processing EC2 launch template workflows. At 3:26 AM PDT, we took mitigation actions by introducing throttling for the affected APIs and we saw some recovery which was communicated directly with a subset of customers via the 'Your Account view' of the AWS Health Dashboard. We took multiple additional mitigation paths, incrementally lifting these throttle limits, and by 6:54 AM PDT, the issue was fully mitigated. We recommend that customers retry any failed requests. The issue has been resolved and all AWS services are now operating normally.

• [RESOLVED] Increased Error Rates and Latencies

  June 30, 2026 · 51m

  Between 1:42 PM and 2:25 PM PDT we experienced increased error rates and latencies for EC2 APIs in the EU-NORTH-1 Region. This issue also affected new instance launches. Other AWS Services that launch new instances or call EC2 APIs as part of their workflows were also affected by this issue. Existing EC2 instances were unaffected by this issue. During this time, customers would have received an Internal Server Error in the Management Console and APIs. Engineers were automatically engaged and began investigating the root cause. We identified the root cause as a planned configuration change. This change was reverted and we began observing recovery at 2:19 PM. By 2:25 PM, the issue was fully mitigated. We do not expect this issue to reoccur. Since the issue was mitigated at 2:25 PM, we have been processing a backlog for ELB workflows and expect this backlog to complete within the next 30 minutes. We recommend customers retry requests that failed during this time. The issue has been resolved and all services are operating normally.

Full analyses live in the post-mortem archive.

Amazon EC2 questions