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AWS North Virginia data center outage – recovery to take hours

159 pointsby christhecaribouyesterday at 3:31 AM114 commentsview on HN

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status?t=2026-05-07

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/08/aws-outage-data-center-fandu...

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/05/08/aws-warns-of...

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazon-clou...


Comments

cmiles8yesterday at 11:05 PM

AWS’s US-East 1 continues to be the Achilles heel of the Internet.

And while yes building across multiple regions and AZs is a thing, AWS has had a string of issues where US-East 1 has broader impacts, which makes things far less redundant and resilient than AWS implies.

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aurareturnyesterday at 11:12 PM

These things are dangerous. Someone who can take AWS down such as an employee can place a bet.

These bets aren’t as innocent as they seem because the bettors can often influence or change the outcome.

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fabian2kyesterday at 9:53 PM

I thought cooling was pretty much pre-planned in any data center, and you simply don't install more stuff than you can cool?

So did some cooling equipment fail here or was there an external reason for the overheating? Or does Amazon overbook the cooling in their data centers?

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corvadyesterday at 11:56 PM

It's always East 1... Jokes aside I don't understand how often east-1 is taken down compared to other regions. Like it should be pretty similar to other regions architecture wise.

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merekyesterday at 3:44 AM

Related:

AWS EC2 outage in use1-az4 (us-east-1)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057294

fastest963today at 12:21 AM

Coinbase claimed multiple AZs were down but the AWS statement was that only a single AZ was affected. Does anyone have more details?

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sitzkriegtoday at 2:12 AM

using aws since s3 came out and i’ve yet to see any major company do multi az failover in any capacity whatsoever. default region ftw

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Havocyesterday at 9:54 PM

Could someone explain to me why they don't build these things near oceans? Like nuclear plants that need plenty cooling capacity too

Two loop cycle with heat exchanger to get rid of the heat

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matt3210today at 2:31 AM

Right, cooling.

yomismoaquitoday at 12:09 AM

How many nines of are we at this year?

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jeffbeetoday at 12:56 AM

I don't see anything on downdetector suggesting this was particularly disruptive.

nikcubyesterday at 11:06 PM

both realtime markets where multi-AZ is hard?

aussieguy1234yesterday at 11:45 PM

Once known for having super reliable services, I've heard this company is scrambling to re hire some of the engineers they overconfidently "replaced" with AI.

When customers pay for cloud services, they expect them to be maintained by competent engineers.

edit: Not sure why the downvotes. If you fire the engineers that have been keeping your systems running reliably for years, what do you expect to happen?

tcp_handshakeryesterday at 9:50 PM

I bet post-mortem will say vibe coding confused fahrenheit and celsius, we run too hot...

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OhMeadhbhyesterday at 11:08 PM

[flagged]

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BugsJustFindMeyesterday at 11:36 PM

[flagged]

tailscaler2026yesterday at 10:30 PM

us-east-1 is down? shocking! stop putting SPOF services there. this location has had frequent issues for the past 15 years.

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