AWS reports two‑hour packet‑loss outage in Spain’s EU‑South‑2 availability zone

Amazon Web Services confirmed a two‑hour period of elevated packet loss that disrupted multiple services within the EU‑South‑2 availability zone in Spain.

What happened

The outage began at approximately 10:15 UTC and lasted until around 12:20 UTC, during which customers experienced intermittent connectivity issues, increased latency, and dropped packets across compute, storage, and networking services.

AWS identified the root cause as a transient fault in the network fabric of the affected zone, which triggered packet‑loss alarms and prompted automatic mitigation actions.

Impact on services

The packet‑loss event primarily affected services hosted in the EU‑South‑2 region, including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS databases, and Amazon S3 buckets. Users reported failed API calls, time‑out errors, and degraded performance in applications reliant on low‑latency networking.

• EC2 instances experienced intermittent connectivity
• RDS database queries showed increased latency
• S3 object retrievals suffered occasional time‑outs

AWS response

AWS engineers activated their incident response protocol, rerouted traffic, and applied firmware updates to the affected network devices. The company issued status updates every 30 minutes and confirmed that normal service levels were restored by 12:20 UTC.

Customers were advised to monitor the AWS Service Health Dashboard for real‑time updates and to consider implementing multi‑AZ architectures to mitigate the impact of future zone‑specific incidents.

We are actively investigating the root cause and have taken steps to prevent recurrence, said AWS in an official statement.

The incident underscores the importance of designing cloud workloads with redundancy across multiple availability zones, especially for latency‑sensitive applications.

For a detailed timeline and technical analysis, see the isdown.app coverage of the AWS packet‑loss outage in Spain.