According to a statement from Amazon, AWS “reported increased error rates for multiple services” beginning shortly after midnight, linked to “DNS resolution issues affecting DynamoDB API endpoints in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) region.” That region — one of AWS’ busiest — underpins much of the cloud infrastructure for public- and private-sector users across the eastern United States.
Amazon also said that the underlying DNS issue was mitigated about two hours after it began, on its AWS Health Dashboard. Still, intermittent problems persisted throughout the morning, with officials saying they were “working to fully restore service as quickly as possible.”
While Amazon did not specify government impacts, the us-east-1 region is often the default for many AWS services and is one of the largest and most active cloud zones. Given its scale, an outage there could affect many public-sector systems — including government websites, citizen portals and services running in the cloud.
For instance, a city’s 311 system built on Amazon Connect or a state unemployment benefits platform using AWS Lambda could experience intermittent access issues during such an outage. Similarly, agencies that depend on AWS’ Simple Storage Service for hosting documents as well as CloudWatch for monitoring system health might face delays in data updates or error logging.
Many state IT departments have migrated critical workloads to AWS for scalability and cost efficiency, but as Monday’s event shows, centralized problems can ripple across government operations in seconds. The reliance has only deepened in recent years, with more documented examples of just how embedded AWS has become in the public sector.
State Medicaid programs have moved eligibility and appeals systems to the cloud, while health agencies are using AWS for generative AI projects designed to simplify medical record abstraction and public health data processing. These are just a few examples that show how core government functions — from Medicaid eligibility to health analytics — now depend on cloud-native infrastructure that can be affected when a single region experiences disruption.
By early afternoon Monday, Amazon noted that “new instance launches were succeeding in several zones” and that fixes were underway to restore full network performance. The company reported steady progress but also said that complete recovery was still in the works.
