“[AWS] began experiencing an increase in instance impairments within the affected zone due to the loss of power during a thermal event,” AWS said this morning. Here’s what you need to know about the AWS data center outage.
One of AWS’ busiest data centers suffered an outage Thursday night due to a “thermal event” with key AWS services like EC2 instance and EBS volumes still impacted as of Friday morning.
AWS confirmed the outage was due to overheating caused by a cooling failure at its North Virginia data center called US-EAST-1 region, which is a heavily used region.
On Thursday evening, AWS “began experiencing an increase in instance impairments within the affected zone due to the loss of power during a thermal event,” the company said Friday morning on its status report.
[Related: AWS CEO Says AI Not ‘Taking Away Jobs’ As Company Plans 11,000 Software Hires]
Key AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon SageMaker, ElastiCache, AWS IoT Core, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and AWS Nat Gateway were impacted.
One of AWS newly minted technology partnerships—cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase—was impacted by the outage for roughly seven hours.
AWS Brings ‘Additional Cooling System Capacity Online’
Several hours after the thermal event occurred, AWS had restored power to its Availability Zone in its US-EAST-1 data center region.
“We restored power to a subset of the affected infrastructure and observed some signs of recovery, which have remained stable,” AWS said Friday morning.
“We continue working to bring additional cooling system capacity online, which will enable us to recover the remaining affected hardware in the impacted zone in a controlled and safe manner,” the company said.
Some AWS Services Still Impacted By Outage
However, some AWS services were still impacted for some customers as of Friday morning including SageMaker, OpenSearch Service, Amazon ElastiCache and EC2 instances.
“Some customers will continue to see their affected EC2 instances and EBS volumes as impaired until we achieve full recovery,” AWS said this morning around 4 a.m. ET.
AWS is recommending that customers, “restore from EBS snapshots and/or replace affected resources by launching new replacement resources in one of the unaffected zones.”
AWS said it is still making progress towards resolving the impaired EC2 instances and degraded EBS volumes in the region.
AWS Customers Effected Include Coinbase
The incident hit AWS customers including cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase, disrupting the company’s exchange functions for several hours.
“Some users may experience delayed sends and receives,” said Coinbase in an incident report Thursday night. “Buys, Sells, and Fiat withdrawals/deposits remain unaffected. We’re working on this issue and will provide updates as soon as possible. Your funds are safe.”
Interestingly, just this week, AWS and Coinbase formed a partnership with AWS AgentCore payments in Amazon Bedrock being built with Coinbase and Stripe. AWS said the new service is the first managed end-to-end payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents.
Coinbase said the primary issues with AWS outage were fully resolved as of Friday morning.
“Details may change as our investigation progresses and more information is received from AWS’s official retrospective, once published,” Coinbase said on social media.
Other reported victims of the AWS outage included the gambling company FanDuel. Both Coinbase and FanDuel said, as of Friday morning, that it has resumed operations.
Drone Attacks On AWS Data Centers In Middle East
This isn’t the first data center outage AWS has suffered this year.
The $150 billion cloud market share leader witnessed drone attacks earlier this year after the start of the Iran, U.S. and Isreal war in the Middle East.
Several AWS data centers in the Middle East were hit by drone strikes in early March as the war began, which knocked out power in AWS facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said in early March.
Weeks later, AWS’ data centers in the region were disrupted once again by ongoing drone activity that impacted Amazon infrastructure. This forced AWS customers to move workloads to other Amazon data centers.
AWS generated $37.6 billion in revenue in Q1 2026, pushing the Amazon cloud unit’s annual run rate above $150 billion.
