How to check AWS status in real time

AWS publishes its service status on the AWS Service Health Dashboard, which you can reach at status.aws.amazon.com. This page shows the current operational status of every AWS region and service — if a region or service is experiencing an outage, it will appear in red or yellow rather than green.

The dashboard updates automatically and shows both current incidents and past events. You can filter by region (US East, EU West, Asia Pacific, and others) or by service name (EC2, RDS, Lambda, S3, and dozens more). If you see a service listed as "Operational" in green, it is running normally. If it shows "Degraded Performance" in yellow or "Service Disruption" in red, that service is having problems in that region.

You can also subscribe to notifications from the dashboard itself. Click the bell icon and choose which regions or services you want to monitor. AWS will then send you email or SMS alerts when status changes occur, so you do not have to check manually every time.

Key Takeaways

  • The AWS Service Health Dashboard at status.aws.amazon.com is the official source for real-time AWS outage information, updated continuously as incidents occur.
  • You can filter the dashboard by region and service name to find out whether the specific AWS service you use is affected.
  • AWS publishes a timeline of past incidents on the same dashboard, showing when problems started, what caused them, and when they were resolved.
  • Subscribing to status notifications means you receive alerts by email or SMS when an outage begins, rather than discovering it when your application stops working.

Understanding AWS region and service outages

AWS operates multiple geographic regions — US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and others. An outage in one region does not affect the others. If your application runs in US East and that region has an outage, your application will be down. If it runs in EU (Ireland), it will keep running.

Within each region, AWS offers many services: EC2 (virtual servers), RDS (databases), S3 (file storage), Lambda (serverless functions), and so on. An outage might affect only one service in one region — for example, S3 in US East might be down while EC2 in the same region keeps running. The Service Health Dashboard breaks this down clearly, so you can see exactly what is and is not working.

Most AWS customers use multiple regions or multiple services as backup. If one region goes down, traffic can shift to another. If one service fails, a backup service can take over. The dashboard helps you understand which of your backup options are still available during an incident.

What to do while AWS is down

If AWS is down and you run a business or application on it, your first step is to check the Service Health Dashboard to confirm the outage is real and see AWS's estimated time to recovery. AWS usually posts updates every 15 to 30 minutes during an active incident, so refresh the page periodically.

Next, check whether your application has failover configured. If you set up your infrastructure to automatically switch to a backup region or service when the primary one fails, your application may already be handling the outage without your intervention. If you did not set up failover, your application will stay down until AWS recovers or you manually switch it.

During an outage, AWS support receives thousands of inquiries. If you have a support contract (AWS Business or Enterprise support), you can open a case and get a response within one hour. If you have the free Basic support tier, AWS will not respond to outage-related cases — you can only wait for the service to recover. This is one reason many production applications pay for a higher support tier.

How AWS outages happen and how long they usually last

AWS outages fall into a few categories. Hardware failures affect individual servers or network equipment and usually last minutes to an hour. Software bugs in AWS services can take longer — sometimes several hours — because AWS engineers have to identify the bug, write a fix, test it, and roll it out without causing more damage. Networking issues between regions or to the internet can last anywhere from minutes to hours depending on the cause.

Major outages that affect multiple services or regions are rare. AWS's last significant multi-service outage in a major region was in December 2021, when US East (N. Virginia) experienced a widespread failure lasting several hours. Most outages affect a single service or a subset of services in a single region and last under an hour.

AWS publishes a detailed post-incident report after major outages, explaining what went wrong and what they changed to prevent it from happening again. You can read these reports on the AWS blog to understand the root cause and decide whether the incident affects your own architecture.

Setting up alerts so you know before your users do

The easiest way to stay informed is to subscribe to AWS Health notifications directly from the Service Health Dashboard. You can also use third-party monitoring tools like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Datadog, which integrate with AWS Health and can trigger alerts to your team's phones or Slack channels the moment an outage begins.

A second layer of protection is application-level monitoring. Tools like New Relic, Splunk, or CloudWatch (AWS's own monitoring service) watch your application's performance and alert you if response times spike or error rates jump. This catches problems that AWS might not have flagged yet — for example, if AWS says a service is operational but a bug is causing errors for your specific use case.

The best practice is to combine both: subscribe to AWS Health notifications so you know when AWS has a problem, and set up application monitoring so you know when your users are experiencing problems, whether or not AWS has declared an outage.

Designing your application to survive AWS outages

If you cannot afford downtime, you need redundancy. This means running your application in multiple AWS regions at the same time, with a load balancer or DNS service directing traffic to whichever region is healthy. If one region goes down, traffic automatically shifts to the others. This costs more because you are paying for infrastructure in multiple places, but it means an outage in one region does not take down your service.

A simpler approach is to use managed services that AWS already runs across multiple regions for you. S3 (file storage) and DynamoDB (database) can be configured to replicate data across regions automatically. If one region fails, your data is still available in another. This is cheaper than running your own multi-region application but still gives you protection.

Even if you cannot afford multi-region redundancy, you can improve your situation by backing up your data regularly and documenting your recovery process. If AWS does go down, you can restore from backup to a different cloud provider or to on-premises infrastructure while you wait for AWS to recover. This takes longer than automatic failover but is better than losing data or staying down indefinitely.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if AWS is down or if it is just my application?

Check the AWS Service Health Dashboard first. If the service you use shows green and "Operational", AWS is not the problem — the issue is in your application or network. If the dashboard shows yellow or red, AWS is having an outage. You can also check your application logs to see what error messages it is producing, which often tells you whether the problem is on your side or AWS's.

Can I get a refund if AWS is down and my business loses money?

AWS offers service credits (not cash refunds) if an outage lasts longer than a certain threshold — usually 99.95% uptime per month. The credit is a percentage of your monthly bill, not compensation for lost revenue. You have to request the credit; AWS does not issue it automatically. Check your service level agreement to see what uptime may provide applies to the service you use.

Does AWS go down often?

Major outages affecting many customers are rare — a few per year at most. Small outages affecting one service or region happen more often but usually last under an hour. Most AWS customers experience at least one noticeable outage per year, though many never notice because they have redundancy set up.

What should I do if I see an outage on the dashboard but my application is still working?

AWS sometimes declares a service degraded even when most customers are not affected. Your application might be using a part of the service that is still working, or you might be in a region that is not affected. Keep monitoring the dashboard and your application's performance. If everything keeps working, you do not need to do anything.

Is there a way to get notified before AWS has an outage?

No. AWS does not announce planned maintenance that will cause outages — they design maintenance to happen without downtime. Unplanned outages cannot be predicted. You can only be notified after an outage starts, which is why subscribing to AWS Health notifications and setting up application monitoring are important.