I'm building for high availability in AWS and I'm curious about the recent history of Availability Zone (AZ) outages. Specifically, has anyone experienced an AZ going down in London or Frankfurt over the last couple of years? Any insights or experiences would be appreciated!
4 Answers
In the past few years, I remember losing an AZ due to a network change AWS tried in one region. It did take out an AZ in Europe, but that was a few years back. Since then, I haven't seen anything major like that happening again.
The complete failure of an AZ happens extremely rarely. However, things like power cuts or network issues in one of its data centers can lead to performance problems. From what I've seen with AWS, most of the issues are self-inflicted—like deployment errors or bugs—rather than AWS's infrastructure failing completely.
It's pretty rare for an entire AZ to go completely down. Most outages are related to specific services or features rather than the whole zone failing. For example, you might find that certain EC2 instance types get in short supply or experience networking issues. If your setup relies on a particular service and it goes down, that’s when you’ll notice problems, but it might not even be AWS's fault; it could be your own connection issues too.
Exactly! It's often internal issues that lead to more headaches than external outages.
You can actually check AWS's live status page and filter for specific regions/AZs. It’s a handy tool to see any past outages and helps keep you informed without guesswork.
Thanks for the tip! I’ll definitely check that out.
Right, having backups or multiple connections really helps mitigate these kinds of issues.