First, confirm it is actually AWS and not your store. Then contain the damage and communicate. Here is exactly how to do that during a AWS outage, plus what usually breaks and how long incidents tend to last.
How do I confirm AWS is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live AWS status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, AWS's own status page at health.aws.amazon.com/health/status. If the official page still shows green, do not assume you are wrong: vendors often acknowledge incidents well after they start. If both look clean, the problem is more likely your store's configuration or a specific integration.
What does a AWS outage look like?
- 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
What breaks in your store
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.
For context, AWS has had no major incidents in the last 90 days of StatusBird's independent monitoring (100.0% availability), so a real outage is unusual. That makes it easy to mistake one for a problem on your end, which is why confirming first matters.
What to do during the outage
- Check health.aws.amazon.com to identify which services and regions are affected before assuming your own code broke.
- If you run on AWS with multi-region capability, fail over to an unaffected region.
- Post a status update to customers on social channels or a status page hosted outside AWS.
- Hold off on deploys and infrastructure changes until AWS stabilizes, since control plane operations are often unreliable during incidents.
- Triage which of your third-party tools are affected and switch critical functions, like support email, to alternatives temporarily.
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.
After the outage
Once AWS recovers, verify the affected workflows end to end rather than trusting the status page. Note the start and end times while they are fresh: if you are on a paid AWS plan with an SLA, documented downtime is what a service credit claim is built on. See how to claim SLA credits for the process.
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.