AWS EC2 Outage Disrupts Services Due to Power Loss in US-EAST-1 Region

Severity: Medium (Score: 49.5)

Sources: News.Ycombinator, Theregister

Summary

Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a power outage affecting its EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region on May 7, 2026. The outage was caused by overheating in a single availability zone, leading to impairments in EC2 instances and EBS volumes. Users reported elevated error rates and latencies, impacting services like Coinbase and FanDuel. AWS has acknowledged the issue and is working to restore normal operations, but recovery efforts are slower than anticipated. As of May 8, AWS has made some progress in restoring cooling systems and recovering affected hardware. The incident has drawn attention due to previous outages in the same region, which have historically caused significant disruptions. Key Points: • AWS experienced a power outage in the US-EAST-1 region, impacting EC2 and EBS services. • Major platforms like Coinbase and FanDuel reported trading disruptions due to the outage. • AWS is working to restore services but has warned of slower recovery times than expected.

Key Entities

• Amazon Web Services (company)
• EBS (platform)
• EC2 (platform)