An AWS networking failure cut connectivity between the us‑west‑2 region and Seattle, causing cascading outages for dozens of services.
An AWS networking failure on July 24, 2026 severed connectivity between the us‑west‑2 region and Seattle, triggering a cascade of service disruptions across dozens of cloud‑based applications.
What Went Wrong
AWS engineers identified a misconfiguration in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routers that manage traffic between the us‑west‑2 data centers and the Seattle edge network. The error caused route flaps, leading to intermittent packet loss and eventual loss of all traffic paths.
The routing issue propagated to downstream services that rely on internal DNS resolution, causing health checks to fail and automated scaling groups to terminate instances prematurely.
Impact on Customers
Major SaaS platforms, video streaming services, and enterprise workloads reported outages ranging from a few minutes to several hours. Users experienced login failures, stalled uploads, and broken API calls.
- E‑commerce sites saw checkout errors
- Streaming providers reported buffering and playback stops
- Data analytics pipelines missed scheduled jobs
Recovery Timeline
AWS initiated a manual route withdrawal at 02:14 UTC, but the complex mesh of redundant paths required incremental validation. Full restoration of stable routing was not achieved until 09:47 UTC, leaving a long recovery tail that affected customers well beyond the initial incident window.
During the recovery, AWS provided status updates through the Service Health Dashboard and posted a post‑mortem detailing the root cause and corrective actions.
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption and are implementing additional safeguards to prevent similar routing failures in the future," the AWS post‑mortem states.
The incident underscores the importance of multi‑region failover strategies and the need for robust monitoring of network routing protocols.