This article needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(January 2020)
This is a timeline of Amazon Web Services, which offers a suite of cloud computing services that make up an on-demand computing platform.
AWS Prelude
Year
Month and date (if available)
Event type
Details
2000
Prelude
Amazon.com, the parent company of the as yet nonexistent AWS, begins work on merchant.com, an e-commerce platform intended for use by other large retailers such as Target Corporation. In the process, Amazon's team realizes that they need to decouple their code better, with cleaner interfaces and access APIs. Around the same time, the company also realizes the need to build infrastructure-as-a-service internally, to improve the speed of development and not have it bottlenecked by infrastructure availability. All these changes help pave the way for AWS.[1][2]
2003
Prelude
Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham write a short paper describing a vision for Amazon infrastructure that, in Black's words, "was completely standardized, completely automated, and relied extensively on web services for things like storage."[3][4][5][6][7]
2004
Prelude
Jeff Bezos approves the idea of experimenting with Amazon infrastructure. Pinkham leaves for South Africa to set up a satellite development office. While there, he works on a pilot along with help from Chris Brown and Willem van Biljon. Although the team works from South Africa, the servers are hosted in the United States.[5][6][8]
2004
November 9
Customer outreach
The Amazon Web Services blog is launched, with a first blog post by Jeff Barr.[9][10] At the time, the name Amazon Web Services refers to a collection of APIs and tools to access the Amazon.com catalog, rather than the Infrastructure as a Service it would eventually become.[10][11][12][13]
2005
Prelude
A private precursor to AWS launches, with a small number of customers.[6] At the same time, Amazon begins planning for a public launch of AWS. Based on internal discussions, they decide to launch storage, compute, and database offerings so that developers can use all of them together.[2]
Amazon launches Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which forms a central part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), by allowing users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. The service initially includes machines (instances) available for 10 cents an hour, and is available only to existing AWS customers rather than the general public. The EC2 region is us-east-1, also known as compute-1, and is located in North Virginia.[17][18]
2007
August 22
Product (compute)
Amazon EC2 is now available in unlimited public beta, so that anybody can sign up and start using it. It also launches new instance types.[19]
2007
November 6
Regional diversification
Amazon launches S3 in Europe, reducing latency and bandwidth for European users and helping them comply with privacy requirements.[20]
2007
December 13
Product (database)
Amazon launches Amazon SimpleDB, which allows businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cheaply process vast amounts of data. It uses a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of EC2 and Amazon S3.[21][22]
2008
March 26
Product, regional diversification
Amazon announces Elastic IPs, IP addresses that can be decoupled from physical EC2 machines, as well as availability zones, clusters of one or more data centers in a region such that different availability zones are isolated from each other in terms of power and water sources.[23][24]
2008
April 7
Competition
Google launches Google App Engine, a platform as a service (PaaS) cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers.[25] This is part of the Google Cloud.
Amazon launches EC2 in Europe (specifically, the region eu-west-1 in Ireland), making it easier for European customers to run their instances locally and benefit from higher bandwidth and lower latency. This comes a year after the setting up of S3 in Europe.[29][30]
2009
April
Product (compute)
Amazon launches Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), which allows businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cheaply process vast amounts of data. It uses a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of EC2 and Amazon S3.
2009
May 18
Product (compute)
Amazon introduces Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) (which makes it easy for users to distribute web traffic across Amazon EC2 instances), Auto Scaling (which allows users to scale policies driven by metrics collected by Amazon CloudWatch), and Amazon CloudWatch (for tracking per-instance performance metrics including CPU load).[31]
2009
May 21
Product (data migration)
AWS announces an Import/Export service, whereby people can send their storage device to AWS and AWS will upload the data to S3. This is a predecessor of the Snowball service that they would launch in October 2015.[32]
2009
Aug 25
Product (networking)
AWS launches Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), allowing customers launch EC2 instances into their own logically isolated networks, with the ability to define subnets, routing and access control lists.[33]
AWS launches Simple Notification Service (SNS), a tool to allow developers to push messages generated from an application to other systems and people (by methods such as email or webhooks).[39]
2010
April 29
Regional diversification
AWS launches a region, called ap-southeast-1, in Singapore. This is its first region in the Asia-Pacific, and is intended to meet the demand for lower latency and better bandwidth for the growing customer base in the Asia-Pacific region.[40]
2010
May 15
Product (management)
Amazon launches AWS CloudFormation, its tool to help customers define collections of AWS resources (called stacks) with AWS taking care of using the definitions to provision and configure the required resources. CloudFormation is an early example of a declarative Infrastructure as Code tool.[41]
AWS launches AWS Elastic Beanstalk, an orchestration service for deploying infrastructure which orchestrates AWS services including EC2, S3, SNS, CloudWatch, autoscaling, and Elastic Load Balancers.[46][47]
2011
January 25
Product (Internet delivery)
AWS announces the launch of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), a service for large-scale email delivery.[48][49] A week later, MailChimp announces its own Simple Transaction Service (STS) for bulk email delivery using SES.[50]
2011
March 2
Regional diversification
AWS launches a new region, named ap-northeast-1 in Tokyo, Japan, its second in the Asia-Pacific region. The region is launched to meet the needs of AWS' current and potential Japanese customer base for low latency and better bandwidth.[51]
2011
June 21
Competition
DigitalOcean launches.[52] By November 2015, it becomes the second largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers.[53][54]
2011
July 19
Ecosystem
Netflix announces its suite of tools ("Simian Army") including Chaos Monkey, that randomly terminates EC2 instances within an autoscaling group during working hours so that the company is forced to design its systems with fault tolerance and rapid recovery.[55]
2011
November 9
Regional diversification
AWS launches a new region called us-west-2 and located in Oregon, its third region in the United States for general public use.[56][57]
2011
September 1
Ecosystem
Cloudyn, which provides cloud monitoring and cost optimization for cloud infrastructure (like that of Amazon AWS), launches.[citation needed]
2011
December 14
Regional diversification
AWS launches a new region, called sa-east-1, in São Paulo, Brazil. This is its first region in South America.[58]
AWS Marketplace is "an online store where customers can find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS."[60][61]
2012
June 11
Product (security)
Amazon launches AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for EC2.[62]
2012
July 30
Ecosystem
Netflix open sources Chaos Monkey, its tool for simulating outages by randomly terminating EC2 instances, to help other companies build fault tolerant systems in the AWS cloud.[63][64][65]
2012
July 30
Product (storage)
Provisioned IOPS (PIOPs) are a new EBS volume type designed to deliver predictable, higher performance for I/O intensive workloads.[66][67]
AWS launches a region, ap-southeast-2, in Sydney, Australia. This is its third region in the Asia-Pacific and its eighth public region (excluding AWS GovCloud).[70]
AWS announces AWS Activate, a global program for startups. Participating startups receive promotional credits that can be spent within AWS, as well as training, support, and access to a forum.[74]
2013
November 4
Product (compute)
Amazon announces G2 instances, a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance type designed for applications that require 3D graphics capabilities.[75]
2013
November 13
Product
Amazon announces AWS CloudTrail, a web service that delivers logs of API calls made on the user's account to Amazon S3 buckets.[76]
2013
December 17
Product (data flow)
Amazon releases Amazon Kinesis, a service for real-time processing of streaming data.[77][78]
2013
December 18
Regional diversification
AWS launches in China, with a limited preview of its Beijing region.[79][80] However, due to Internet censorship in China, its China data center is not part of the global AWS network. Rather, it is a standalone region with the same APIs and services as available in other AWS regions, but a user must create a separate AWS account for AWS China and cannot use the AWS Global account. The service operator is Beijing Sinnet Technology Co.[81]
2014
August
Security Certification
AWS first to achieve MTCS Level 3 Certification.[82]
2014
October 23
Regional diversification
AWS launches its second region in Europe, specifically, eu-central-1 in Frankfurt, Germany.[83]
2014
November 12
Product (database)
AWS announces Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database offering enhanced high availability and performance.[84][85] The feature becomes available to all AWS customers on July 27, 2015.[86][87]
AWS launches a preview of EC2 Container Service (ECS), facilitating the use of container infrastructure on AWS. Third-party integration such as those with Docker are available at the time of release.[89][90][91][92]
2014
November 13
Product (compute)
AWS launches AWS Lambda, its Functions as a Service (FaaS) tool. With Lambda, AWS customers can define and upload functions with specific triggers and execution code. AWS takes care of executing the function on the trigger occurring, and the AWS customer does not have to provision or manage the compute resources.[93][94] Lambda is an early harbinger of the concept of "serverless architecture", referring to the idea of providing services without having dedicated servers to provide those services.[95][96][97]
2014
December 17
Product
Introduction of Resource Groups and Tag Editor in AWS Management Console[98]
2015
February 12
Product
Introduction of permission and privileged policies managed by Amazon in AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM).[99]
2015
April 9
Product
AWS announces a new machine learning platform at the AWS Summit in San Francisco, specifically suited to machine learning without requiring specific expertise.[100]
2015
April 28
Acquisitions
AWS acquires ClusterK, a startup that allows users to run apps on Amazon's cloud for 1/10th of the regular price.[101]
2015
May 19
Evaluation
Gartner releases an updated version of its Magic Quadrant, evaluating Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the only two services in the top right quadrant ("Leaders") with AWS higher up. A number of services are in the bottom right and bottom left quadrants.[102][103][104]
AWS Inspector preview will be available soon.[108]
2015
October 7
QuickSight
Amazon QuickSight – Fast & Easy to Use Business Intelligence for Big Data at 1/10th the Cost of Traditional Solutions.[109]
2015
October 7
Product (data migration)
AWS launches Snowball, a physical appliance with 50 TB of storage and a Kindle on the side. Customers can get a Snowball for 10 days for $200, during which they can fill it with data and then ship it back to Amazon. The Snowball costs $15 for every additional day kept.[110][111] This is the second generation of their data import/export hardware after a previous release in 2009.[111]
2015
October 8
Product (Internet of Things)
AWS announces its managed cloud platform for the Internet of Things.[112][113] The platform becomes generally available on December 18, 2015.[114]
AWS launches a new region, called ap-northeast-2, in Seoul, the capital city of South Korea. The region is the fourth in the Asia-Pacific.[116]
2016
March
Partnerships, Competition
Dropbox announces that it now stores over 90% of its user data on its own infrastructure stack as it continues to transition from Amazon S3.[117][118][119]
2016
May 18
Product (Computing)
AWS announces Automatic Auto Scaling for Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) services.[120]
2016
June 21
Product (Computing)
AWS announces AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to provisioning and managing SSL/TLS certificates.[121]
AWS launches Elastic File System (EFS) in production in three AWS regions (us-east-1, us-west-2, and eu-west-1). EFS allows customers to create POSIX-compliant file systems that can be attached to multiple EC2 instances. The file system grows and shrinks as needed and performance scales with storage size.[126][127][128] The service was originally announced on April 9, 2015.[129][130]
2016
July 14
Acquisitions
AWS acquires Cloud9, a San Francisco–based startup that has built an integrated development environment (IDE) for web and mobile developers to collaborate.
2016
August 4
Evaluation
Gartner publishes an update to its Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. The top right quadrant (for leaders) has only two players: Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, with AWS significantly higher. The only other player on the right half is Google Cloud Platform (a change from last year, when there were many others in the right half as well), and all other players are in the bottom left.[131][132]
2016
October 13
Partnerships
VMWare, a company that provides cloud and virtualization services, announces a partnership with AWS, under which all of VMware's infrastructure will soon be available on AWS.[133][134][135]
2016
October 17
Regional diversification
AWS launches its fourth public region in the United States, called us-east-2, in Ohio, with three availability zones. AWS also announces that it will treat this region and the North Virginia region as one region when considering transfer pricing (for instance, EC2 to EC2 transfer will be charged at the inter-availability zone price, and S3 to EC2 transfer will be free), allowing its customers to have more regional redundancy and to migrate data off of the North Virginia data center.[136][137][138]
2016
November 30
Product (data migration)
AWS announces the AWS Snowmobile, a secure data truck that can store up to 100 PB of data and supports data transfer at a rate of 1 Tb/second across multiple 40 Gb/second connections (so the truck can be filled in 10 days).[139][140][141][142]
2016
November 30
Product (Internet of Things, data migration)
AWS announces Snowball Edge, an augmentation of its previous device Snowball. Snowball Edge is a piece of hardware with 100 TB of storage and an attached Kindle, as well as the capability to run AWS Lambda functions with the compute capability of the m4.4xlarge EC2 instance. Customers can request a Snowball Edge at $300 for ten days with an additional charge of $30 per day; after shipping it back the data can be uploaded to S3 as with the original Snowball.[142][143][144]
2016
November 30
Product
AWS announces Amazon Lightsail, intended to compete against existing virtual private server offerings such as those by Linode and DigitalOcean. Lightsail packages together a compute server, storage, and transfer into fixed-price plans, like VPS providers do.[145][146][147] Lightsail is a little more expensive than but otherwise comparable to similarly priced plans offered at the time by Linode and DigitalOcean. Linode is cheaper in terms of RAM and both Linode and DigitalOcean are cheaper in terms of network overage costs, but Lightsail costs less if the server is being spun up for only a few hours.[148]
Amazon Pinpoint[150] tool designed to let developers send targeted push notifications.
2016
December 1
Product
Amazon Step Functions[151] tool design to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows.
2016
December 8
Regional diversification
AWS launches its first region in Canada, called ca-central-1 for Canada (Central).[152][153]
2016
December 13
Regional diversification
AWS launches its London region (eu-west-2). This is its third region in Europe and first in the United Kingdom, the other two regions being in Frankfurt (Germany) and Ireland.[154][155][156] Plans for the region had been announced in November 2015.[157]
2016
December 22
Product (Compute)
AWS EC2 Systems Manager management service to automate configuration and magament of EC2 and On-Premises Systems.[158]
2017
February 23
Product (compute)
AWS launches i3 instances, a new generation of instances with large SSDs intended to be used for high-throughput datastores. The instances are more than 50% cheaper than the corresponding previous generation i2 instances, and have larger memory.[159][160][161]
2017
August 14
Product (database)
Amazon Glue – a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service[162]
AWS CloudWatch agent for Linux and Windows which allows collection of disk and memory metrics as well as logs.[175]
2017
December 18
Regional diversification
AWS launches its Paris region (eu-west-3). Paris joins Ireland, Frankfurt, and London as the fourth AWS Region in Europe.[176]
2017
December 18
Product
AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise become available in nine regions.[177]
2018
April 4
Product (security)
Amazon launches AWS Secrets Manager which manages the storage, distribution, and rotation of secrets via API, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS Lambda functions.[178]
2018
June 5
Product (compute)
AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) available in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions.[179]
Amazon Forecast allows customers to use their historical data produce forecasts for topics such as inventory levels and product demand.[191][192]
2018
November 29
Product (AI)
Amazon DeepLens is a wireless video camera. DeepLens is designed such that customers can deploy their own deep learning models for computer vision onto the camera.[193][194]
2018
November 29
Product (compute)
Amazon MSK: Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka in Public Preview[195]
2018
November 29
Product
AWS Well-Architected Tool: review workloads against the latest AWS architectural best practices, and get guidance on how to improve cloud architectures[196]
2019
January 16
Product (compute)
Amazon Backup service for Amazon EBS volumes, RDS databases, DynamoDB tables, EFS file systems and AWS Storage Gateway volumes limited to a given AWS region.[197][198]
Amazon announces AWS re:Post, a crowd-sourced and expert-reviewed Q&A service for technical questions about AWS that replaces the original AWS Forums.[221]
M7g and R7g instances powered by the latest generation AWS Graviton3 processors now available which are designed to deliver up to 25% better performance than the equivalent sixth-generation (M6g and R6g) instances.[226]
2023
April 3
Product
AWS Service Catalog support for Terraform open source.[227]
2023
April 13
Product (AI)
Amazon CodeWhisperer, real-time AI coding companion.[228]
2023
April 20
Product
Amazon CodeCatalyst, unified software development service.[229]
2023
May 4
Product (AI)
ml.inf2 (Inferentia2) and ml.trn1 (Trainium) family of instances on Amazon SageMaker for deploying machine learning (ML) models for Real-time and Asynchronous inference.[230]
2023
May 30
Product
Amazon Security Lake, centralized data lake for cloud and on-premises security data.[231]
2023
August 1
Regional diversification
Amazon launches il-central-1 in Israel (Tel Aviv).[232]
2023
September 28
Product (AI)
Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service for AI foundation models.[233]
2023
October 10
Solution (AI)
Generative AI Application Builder on AWS facilitates the development, rapid experimentation, and deployment of generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications without requiring deep experience in AI.[234]
Amazon SageMaker HyperPod reduces time to train foundation models (FMs) by up to 40% by providing purpose-built infrastructure for distributed training at scale[236]
2024
March 4
Product (AI)
Anthropic's Claude 3 Sonnet foundation model is now available in Amazon Bedrock[237]
2024
April 23
Product (AI)
Amazon makes model evaluation capability for Amazon Bedrock generally available.[238]
2024
April 23
Product (AI)
Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock now available with new safety filters and privacy controls.[239]
Amazon Q Business now GA and Amazon Q Apps in Preview[241]
2024
May 7
Product (AI)
Amazon Bedrock Studio, a web interface providing the easiest way for developers across an organization to collaborate and build generative AI applications[242]
Amazon SageMaker now offers a fully managed MLflow capability[244]
2024
June 20
Product (AI)
Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet foundation model, which is its most intelligent model to date, is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock.[245]
2024
December 03
Product (AI)
Amazon EC2 Trn2 Instances and Trn2 UltraServers for AI/ML training and inference are now available[246]
2025
December
Product (AI)
DeepSeek-R1 models now available on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker AI[247]
Partnerships
Year
Month and date (if available)
Event type
Details
2007
June 1
Partnerships
Dropbox is founded.[248] Dropbox, a storage and backup service aimed at ordinary consumers and businesses, would grow into one of the biggest users of Amazon S3.
2008
August
Partnerships
Netflix announces it will start moving all its data to the Amazon Web Services cloud. It finally shifts all its data to the cloud by January 2016.[249]
2009
June 15
Partnerships
Zynga announces that it will move its data to AWS.[250]
2009
November
Partnerships
reddit announces that it has finished decommissioning its physical servers and moves its data to AWS.[251]
2010
March
Partnerships
Pinterest launches the first prototype of its product.[252] Pinterest would grow into one of AWS's most famous customers and a case study in how a startup can grow extremely quickly by relying on the cloud.[253]
2011
June
Partnerships
Zynga CEO Allan Leinwand announces that Zynga will shift its data from AWS to its own zCloud. It moves from 20% to 80% of its data being stored on the zCloud from the beginning to the end of 2011.[254]
2011
August 16
Partnerships
AWS launches AWS GovCloud, a US region designed to meet the regulatory requirements of the United States government, and intended for use by United States government agencies.[255][256]
2014
January
Partnerships
Moz announces its decision to move off AWS, citing expenses.[257]
2014
August 25
Partnerships
Amazon.com acquires Twitch Interactive for US$970 million.[258][259] The ability to store Twitch data on AWS is specifically cited as one of the major reasons why Twitch decided to go under Amazon.
2015
May 8
Partnerships
Zynga announces that it will move all its data back to AWS, after diversifying away from AWS in 2011.[260]
Salesforce.com, a cloud computing company that makes money primarily through its customer relationship management product suite, selects Amazon Web Services as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. However, Salesforce.com does not plan to move entirely to Amazon, but rather use Amazon only to meet infrastructure expansion needs in new geographical areas and for specific use cases.[262][263][264] On December 2, 2016, the partnership is extended and it is announced that Salesforce will use AWS infrastructure in Canada.[265][266]
2017
April
Partnerships
DXC Technology announces it will increase integration with AWS for its enterprise clients.[267]
2020
May
Partnerships
Kyvos BI acceleration platform announces availability on AWS.[268]
2023
February 7
Partnerships
Ateme completes ISV Accelerate Program, ISW Workload Migration and is available on AWS Marketplace. This indicates that Ateme's solutions meet AWS standards and further support its global partnership with AWS.[269]
2023
September 25
Partnerships
Amazon and Anthropic selects AWS as its primary cloud provider and will train and deploy its future foundation models on AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, taking advantage of AWS's high-performance, low-cost machine learning accelerators.[270]
2024
May 6
Partnerships
AWS signes a strategic collaboration agreement with Mavenir resulting in jointly architecting Mavenir's technology of cloud-native Telco solutions to transform how operators launch 5G, IP Multimedia Subsystem, Radio Access Network and future network technologies.[271][272]
Amazon Web Services outages
Year
Month and date (if available)
Event type
Details
2011
April 21
Outage
At 12:47 am PDT on April 21, an invalid traffic shift prior to network upgrade caused EBS instances to lose connectivity to one another with an availability zone of US-East-1 region. Once the errors were localized to just one availability zone, the EBS recovery These connectivity errors impacted EBS volume and EC2 instances in multiple availability zones and caused issues for customers until full recovery at 3:00 pm PDT on April 24.[273][274]
2011
August 7
Outage
Power lost in Ireland, EU West region, causing disruption and outage "service disruption began at 10:41 AM PDT on August 7th"[275] (also mentioned but distinct from the outage mentioned above; it happened around the same time as the US outage). Due to followup issues, full restoration of e g EBS and RDS took in the order of days.[276]
2011
August 8
Outage
EC2 went down around 10:25 p.m. Eastern in Amazon's U.S. East Region. The cloud outage lasted roughly 30 minutes, but took down the Web sites and services of many major Amazon cloud customers, including Netflix, Reddit and Foursquare. The issue happened in the networks that connect the Availability Zones to the Internet and was primarily caused by a software bug in the router.[277]
2012
June 29
Service disruption
A major disruption occurs to the EC2, EBS, and RDS services in a single availability zone (due to a large scale electrical storm which swept through the Northern Virginia area).[278]
2012
October 22
Outage
A major outage occurs (due to latent memory leak bug in an operational data collection agent), affecting many sites such as Reddit, Foursquare, Pinterest, and others.[279]
2012
December 24
Outage
AWS suffers an outage, causing websites such as Netflix instant video to be unavailable for customers in the Northeastern United States.[280][281]
2013
September 13
Outage
AWS US-East-1 region experienced network connectivity issues affecting instances in a single Availability Zone. We also experienced increased error rates and latencies for the EBS APIs and increased error rates for EBS-backed instance launches.[282]
2014
November 26
Service disruption
Amazon CloudFront DNS server went down for two hours, starting at 7:15 p.m. EST. The DNS server was back up just after 9 p.m. Some websites and cloud services were knocked offline as the content delivery network failed to fulfill DNS requests during the outage. Nothing major, but worthy of this list because it involved the world's biggest and longest-running cloud.[283]
2015
September 20
Outage
The Amazon DynamoDB service experiences an outage in an availability zone in the us-east-1 (North Virginia) region, due to a power outage and inadequate failover procedures. The outage, which occurs on a Sunday morning, lasts for about five hours (with some residual impact till Monday) and affects a number of related Amazon services include Simple Queue Service, EC2 autoscaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and the online AWS console.[284] A number of customers are negatively affected, including Netflix, but Netflix is able to recover quickly because of its strong disaster recovery procedures.[285]
2016
June 5
Outage
AWS Sydney experiences an outage for several hours as a result of severe thunderstorms in the region causing a power outage to the data centers.[286][287][288]
2017
February 28
Outage
Amazon experiences an outage of S3 in us-east-1.[289] There are also related outages for other services in us-east-1 including CloudFormation, autoscaling, Elastic MapReduce, Simple Email Service, and Simple Workflow Service. A number of websites and services using S3, such as Medium, Slack, Imgur and Trello, are affected. AWS's own status dashboard initially fails to reflect the change properly due to a dependency on S3.[290][291][292] On March 2, AWS reveals that the outage was caused by an incorrect parameter passed in by an authorized employee while running an established playbook, that ended up deleting more instances than the employee intended.[293]
2018
March 2
Service degradation
Starting 6:25 AM PST, Direct Connect experienced connectivity issues related to a power outage issue in their US-East-1 Region. This caused customers to have service interruptions in reaching their EC2 instances. Issue was resolved fully by 10:26 AM PST.[294]
2018
May 31
Outage
Beginning at 2:52 pm PDT a small percentage of EC2 servers lost power in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. This resulted in some impaired EC2 instances and degraded performance for some EBS volumes in the affected Availability Zone. Power was restored at 3:22 pm PDT.[295]
2019
August 23
Outage
A number of EC2 servers in the Tokyo region shut down due to overheating at 12:36 pm local time, due to a failure in the datacenter control and cooling system.[296]
2019
August 31
Outage and data loss
The US-EAST-1 data center suffered a power failure at 4:33 am local time, and the backup generators failed at 6 am. According to AWS, this affected 7.5 percent of the EC2 instances in one of the ten data centers in one of the six Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. However, after restoring power, a number of EBS volumes, which store the filesystems of the EC2 cloud servers, were permanently unrecoverable. This caused downtime for companies such as Reddit.[297][298][299]
2019
October 22–23
Service degradation from DDoS
AWS sustained a distributed denial of service attack which caused intermittent DNS resolution errors (for their Route 53 DNS service) from 10:30 am PST to 6:30 pm PST.[300]
2020
November 25
Outage
Beginning at 9:52 am PST the Kinesis Data Streams API became impaired in the US-EAST-1 Region. This prevented customers from reading or writing data.[301]
2021
December 7
Outage
Beginning at 10:45 am PST "an impairment of several network devices" in the US-EAST-1 Region caused widespread errors in all AWS services. The root cause has been mitigated by 4:35 PM PST, but service recovery was still underway causing localized ongoing impairment.[302]
2021
December 15
Outage
Region us-west-1 was unavailable for about 30 minutes.[303]
2021
December 22
Outage and potential data loss
Power loss in us-east-1 for about 1 hour, followed by extended recovery procedures.[303] AWS attributed the failure to a single availability zone, USE1-AZ4.[304]
2023
June 13
Outage
Beginning at 11:49 am PDT, customers experienced increased error rates and latencies for AWS Lambda function invocations within the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region. By 3:37 pm PDT, the AWS Lambda service and all dependent service resumed normal operations.[305]
^"About Dropbox". Dropbox, Inc. Archived from the original on 2019-06-27. Retrieved 2013-06-03. Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator.
^"Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again". Archived from the original on 2021-12-23. Retrieved 2021-12-23. We can confirm a loss of power within a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region. This is affecting availability and connectivity to EC2 instances that are part of the affected data center within the affected Availability Zone. We are also experiencing elevated RunInstance API error rates for launches within the affected Availability Zone. Connectivity and power to other data centers within the affected Availability Zone, or other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region are not affected by this issue, but we would recommend failing away from the affected Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) if you are able to do so. We continue to work to address the issue and restore power within the affected data center.