AWS Northern Virginia Region Hit by Power Outage After Thermal Event in Data Center
May 8, 2026
AWS Northern Virginia Region Hit by Power Outage After Thermal Event in Data Center
Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia cloud region experienced a significant power disruption on May 7, 2026, after a thermal incident caused temperatures to spike within a single data center, leading to service impairments across one of its availability zones. The incident, which began at 5:25 p.m. PDT, affected the use1-az4 availability zone, where instances running on impacted hardware suffered power loss, impacting both EC2 instances and EBS volumes.
The outage highlights the fragility of even the most established cloud infrastructure. The US-East-1 region, AWS’s oldest and largest, launched in 2006 and now comprises six availability zones, each housing multiple data centers. According to AWS’s health status page, the thermal event triggered an “increase in temperatures within a single data center,” causing impairments for instances in the affected zone. The company noted that “EC2 instances and EBS volumes hosted on impacted hardware are affected by the loss of power during the thermal event.”
By 8:06 p.m. PDT, AWS reported “incremental progress to restore cooling systems within the affected AZ,” but warned that progress had been “slower than originally anticipated.” However, by 10:11 p.m., the company observed “early signs of recovery,” stating it had “been able to get additional cooling system capacity online, which has allowed us to recover some affected racks and are actively working to recover additional racks in a controlled and safe manner.” Despite these efforts, operational issues remained listed on AWS’s status page at the time of reporting.
The Northern Virginia region has a history of major disruptions, including a severe outage in October 2025 that took down services such as Perplexity, Snapchat, Fortnite, Airtable, Canva, Amazon, Slack, Signal, PlayStation, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, Epic Games Store, and Ring Cameras. Previous incidents in 2015, 2017, and 2021 also caused widespread impacts. Separately, AWS continues to face ongoing issues at its UAE region, where data centers were damaged due to conflict in the Middle East, prompting the company to advise customers to move workloads from its Bahrain region to other parts of its network.
Industry analysts view the repeated power failures at AWS’s flagship region as a critical reminder for enterprises to diversify their cloud strategies and implement robust disaster recovery plans. The reliance on a single region for mission-critical workloads remains a vulnerability, especially as hyperscale providers expand capacity to meet surging demand for AI and cloud services.
Source: datacenterdynamics
