The short answer: aWS has been highly reliable recently: StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 100.0% availability and zero major incidents over the last 90 days.
Below is the data behind that answer and how AWS compares to its peers.
What is AWS?
Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud infrastructure provider, supplying the compute, storage, databases, DNS, and CDN services that a huge share of the internet runs on. E-commerce stores depend on it directly if they host a custom or headless storefront on AWS, and indirectly because many of their SaaS tools, including platforms, marketing apps, and payment services, run on AWS themselves.
AWS uptime and outage history
| Metric (90 days, as of July 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Availability | 100.0% |
| Reliability grade | A+ |
| Major incidents | 0 |
| Total major-outage downtime | 0 minutes |
| Average incident duration | n/a |
| Most recent major incident | None in the last 90 days |
| Checks in window | 43,605 |
Among the 4 infrastructure services StatusBird monitors, AWS currently holds the top reliability position for the 90-day window.
What happens to your store when AWS goes down?
The blast radius of an AWS outage depends on what you run there and which region is affected. If your storefront is hosted on AWS, your entire site can go down or slow to a crawl: pages fail to load, images break if they are served from S3 or CloudFront, and backend APIs error out. Even if your store is hosted elsewhere, a major AWS incident often degrades multiple third-party tools at once, so you may see your email platform, analytics, fulfillment software, and support desk all misbehave simultaneously. Payment providers and platforms with AWS dependencies can see elevated errors even when your own hosting is fine.
Typical symptoms during a AWS outage:
- Your storefront fully down or extremely slow if hosted on AWS
- Broken images or assets served from S3 or CloudFront
- Multiple unrelated SaaS tools erroring or degraded at the same time
- Elevated API errors and timeouts from various integrations
- AWS Console unreachable or your monitoring showing region-wide failures
If you are in the middle of an incident right now, see what to do when AWS goes down for a step-by-step playbook.
Frequently asked questions
My store is on Shopify, so does an AWS outage even affect me?
Possibly, but indirectly. Your storefront itself will likely stay up, but many of the apps and services around it, such as email platforms, review widgets, fulfillment tools, and analytics, may run on AWS and degrade during a major incident. Expect partial breakage rather than a full outage.
How do I know if a problem is AWS or my own site?
Check the AWS Health Dashboard for active incidents in your region and compare with independent reports like outage trackers. If multiple unrelated services you use are failing at the same time, a cloud provider incident is the likely common cause rather than your own configuration.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks AWS's status every 2 minutes, around the clock, independently of the vendor. The availability figure counts major and critical outages only; minor degradation is excluded so numbers are not skewed by vendors that report small blips near-continuously. Grades run from A+ to F. See the live numbers on the AWS reliability page and current status on the AWS status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors AWS and 83 other services online stores depend on, plus your own storefront, every 2 minutes. When something goes down you get an SMS, email, or Slack alert with plain-English context, usually before the official status page catches up. Start monitoring free, no card required for the free plan.