AWS experienced a partial outage affecting the Equinix FR5 location in Frankfurt, disrupting services that rely on its cloud platform.
AWS suffered a partial outage on August 15, 2026 that impacted its Equinix FR5 data center in Frankfurt, causing disruptions for a range of customers relying on the cloud provider’s services.
Scope of the Incident
The outage was limited to the Equinix FR5 facility, one of several locations AWS uses to host its infrastructure in Germany. Customers with workloads deployed in that region reported connectivity issues, latency spikes, and occasional service timeouts.
Affected Services
- Amazon EC2 instances running in the Frankfurt (eu-central-1) region
- Amazon RDS databases hosted in the same availability zone
- Elastic Load Balancers that route traffic through the impacted data center
- AWS Lambda functions triggered by events from affected services
AWS status updates indicated that the root cause was a power distribution failure at the Equinix site, which triggered automatic failover mechanisms for some services but not all.
Customer Response
Many enterprises activated multi‑region disaster recovery plans, shifting workloads to alternative AWS regions such as Ireland (eu-west-1) and Stockholm (eu-north-1). Some smaller users reported prolonged degradation until power was restored.
We experienced intermittent API errors for several minutes, but our failover to another region kept critical transactions running.
AWS engineers worked with Equinix technicians to restore power and re‑establish full connectivity. The provider confirmed that normal operations resumed by early evening UTC.
ServiceAlert AI coverage of the AWS outage on August 15, 2026