Thermal event in Virginia data center triggers AWS US-East-1 outage

A thermal event in an AWS Northern Virginia data center caused a power outage that impaired EC2 instances and EBS volumes in the US-East-1 region (use1-az4). AWS redirected traffic away from the affected zone, warned of longer provisioning times, and advised customers to recover by restoring from snapshots or launching in unaffected zones as recovery progressed unevenly across services. The incident underscores physical-layer risks and the concentration of dependencies in US-East-1, prompting CISOs to reassess resilience and redundancy strategies.