Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Northern Virginia cloud region has been impacted by a "loss of power" in one of its availability zones.

The impacted zone (use1-az4) saw issues as of May 7 at 5:25pm PDT, according to AWS' health status page, wherein instances were experiencing "impairments."

According to the incident report, the power issues were related to a thermal incident, with AWS noting that the company experienced "an increase in temperatures within a single data center, which in some cases has caused impairments for instances in the Availability Zone. EC2 instances and EBS volumes hosted on impacted hardware are affected by the loss of power during the thermal event."

The company said by 8:06pm PDT that it had made "incremental progress to restore cooling systems within the affected AZ" but that progress had been "slower than originally anticipated." By 10:11pm, the company said it was observing some "early signs of recovery" and 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."

While some improvement has been seen, at the time of writing, AWS still lists operational issues in the region.

The Northern Virginia region was previously impacted in October 2025, that time suffering a major outage that brought down the likes of Perplexity, Snapchat, Fortnite, Airtable, Canva, Amazon, Slack, Signal, PlayStation, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, Epic Games Store, and the Ring Cameras. Previous issues were experienced in the cloud region in 2015, 2017, and 2021.

The US-East-1 region is AWS' oldest and largest region. Launched in 2006, it has six availability zones, each of which consists of at least one data center, though likely many more in practise.

Elsewhere, AWS is experiencing ongoing issues at its UAE region after its data centers were damaged as a result of the conflict in the Middle East. The company encouraged customers to move workloads away from its Bahrain region to other parts of its network following the incident.