This document summarizes major, widely reported outages affecting the US‑EAST‑1 region (Northern Virginia) since launch.
Each entry includes the date, affected services, root cause (per AWS or journalistic sources), impact, and links.
- Cause: “Stuck” EBS volumes + replication/network issues in US‑East.
- Impact: Large portions of EC2/EBS unavailable for many customers for days.
- Sources: Wikipedia: Timeline of Amazon Web Services
- Cause: Severe electrical storm in Northern Virginia affecting one Availability Zone.
- Impact: EC2, EBS, RDS disruptions in that AZ.
- Sources: Wikipedia
- Cause: Latent bug in internal monitoring agent in US‑East.
- Impact: Wide service degradation across multiple services/sites.
- Sources: AWS Post‑Event Summary Index
- Cause: Problems with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) in US‑East.
- Impact: Holiday‑time disruption for streaming/consumer services.
- Sources: AWS PES Index
- Cause: Network connectivity issue in one AZ of US‑East.
- Impact: EC2 connectivity + EBS API failures.
- Sources: Wikipedia
- Cause: Power outage/failover gaps in US‑East region affecting DynamoDB.
- Impact: DynamoDB unavailable in one AZ; knock‑on effects on autoscaling, CloudWatch, dependent apps.
- Sources: Wikipedia
- Cause: Human error during maintenance removed too many S3 index servers.
- Impact: Multi‑hour outage for S3 and many dependent services.
- Sources: AWS Message (Official Post‑Mortem) · TechCrunch Report
- Cause: Power failure + backup generator issues in one data center (AZ) of US‑East‑1.
- Impact: EC2 and EBS in that AZ impacted; some permanent data‑loss.
- Sources: Wikipedia
- Cause: Large DDoS attack targeting Route 53 DNS servers.
- Impact: Intermittent DNS resolution errors.
- Sources: Wikipedia
- Cause: Internal service bug affecting Kinesis APIs.
- Impact: Kinesis and dependent services unavailable for several hours.
- Sources: AWS PES Index
- Cause: Impairment of several network devices in US‑East‑1 region.
- Impact: Widespread errors and service disruptions across many AWS services.
- Sources: InfoQ Analysis · ThousandEyes Blog
- Cause: Power loss in one AZ (USE1‑AZ4), followed by extended recovery.
- Impact: ~1 hour outage + longer recovery for affected systems.
- Sources: Catchpoint Blog
- Cause: Internal impairment affecting AWS Lambda.
- Impact: Error rates/latencies for Lambda invocations in Northern Virginia.
- Sources: OnlineOrNot Analysis
- Cause: Large event impacting Kinesis Data Streams in US‑East‑1.
- Impact: Issues reading/writing streams; affected CloudWatch/ECS.
- Sources: AWS PES Index
- Cause: DNS‑system issues within US‑East‑1 per AWS and press.
- Impact: Consumer apps/sites (Snapchat, Ring, Roblox, etc.) disrupted.
- Sources: Associated Press Coverage
- Total major region‑level incidents (2011–2025): ≈14–15
- Definition: Incidents causing region‑wide or multi‑service impact with AWS public or press‑confirmed reporting.
- Sources used: AWS Post‑Event Summary Index, official AWS statements, and reputable tech/journalistic sources.
Prepared: October 20 2025