AWS warns of EC2 ‘impairment’ as power loss hits notorious US-EAST-1 region

Amazon Web Services is working to address a power outage that has created “impairments” to services served from the notorious US-EAST-1 region.

A May 7 incident report time-stamped 5:25 PM PDT (00:25 UTC Friday) states that AWS spotted problems in the use1-az4 availability zone of the US-EAST-1 Region. A subsequent update states “EC2 instances and EBS volumes hosted on impacted hardware are affected by the loss of power during the thermal event.”

An update time-stamped 6:47 PM PDT reveals“We continue to work towards mitigating the increased temperatures to its normal levels,” but warns “Other AWS services that depend on the affected EC2 instances and EBS volumes in this Availability Zone may also experience impairments.”

At 8:06 PM PDT Amazon said it was “actively working to restore temperatures to normal levels … though progress is slower than originally anticipated.”

The cloudy concern said it made “incremental progress to restore cooling systems” but users of EC2 Instances, EBS Volumes, and other services are “experiencing elevated error rates and latencies for some workflows.”

AWS has also shifted traffic away from the stricken AZ,  and suggested companies shift workloads into other US-EAST-1 availability zones.

Good luck getting that done because the update admits “Customers may experience longer than usual provisioning times.”

US-EAST-1 is arguably AWS’s problem child, as it was the site of major outages that took big chunks of the internet offline in 2021 and then again in October 2025 .

AWS execs have told The Register the region isn’t inherently more fragile than other parts of the Amazonian cloud, but often runs things at bigger scale than elsewhere and therefore imposes extra stress on services.

The Register will update this story as the situation evolves. ®