AWS North Virginia outage strikes major sites; recovery to take hours

The incident was reported on the AWS status page at 04:35 GMT. AWS engineers said an unknown power surge had hit EC2 and RDS services in three availability zones. The company said recovery would be staged and prioritised by ranked workloads.

DownDetector reports show Reddit fully down, with Snapchat and Roblox partially functional. The UK's HMRC tax system was reported to be issuing late-payment notices. Cloudflare said 'the us-east-1 sector is being drained'.

AWS suffered a similar outage last year and afterwards accelerated its multi-region failover guidance. Forrester analyst James Staten said: 'Enterprise CIOs now have to move away from single-region us-east-1 architecture.' The incident has reignited the 2026 debate over moving AI workloads to regions outside the United States.