On the morning of 14 October 2023, many developers noticed a sudden slowdown in launching new EC2 instances in the US‑EAST‑1 region. The issue was traced to a failure in the EC2 control plane that handles instance provisioning requests. While the underlying infrastructure—compute, storage, and networking—remained operational, the API endpoints responsible for creating and starting instances were unresponsive. As a result, launch requests queued up, causing significant delays.
AWS released a status update later that day, confirming that the root cause was a misconfigured load balancer that routed traffic to a deprecated backend service. The service was unable to process the surge of launch requests, which accumulated and created a backlog. The delay was most pronounced for users who had automated deployment pipelines that triggered instance launches on demand.
Because US‑EAST‑1 is one of the most heavily used regions, the impact rippled across a wide range of workloads—from e‑commerce sites to real‑time analytics platforms. Even a few minutes of delay can affect auto‑scaling groups, scheduled batch jobs, and latency‑sensitive applications.
When an EC2 instance launch stalls, any process that depends on that instance is held up. For example, a microservice that spins up a new container instance to handle a traffic spike will wait for the underlying VM. In a serverless or container‑oriented architecture, the delay can cascade, causing downstream services to timeout or fail.
Take the case of PayStack, a Nigerian fintech that uses AWS for its payment gateway. During the outage, one of its scheduled reconciliation jobs, which runs every hour, was unable to spin up a new EC2 instance to process a batch of transactions. The job timed out after 15 minutes, and the company had to manually trigger a second instance from a backup region. The incident highlighted how tightly coupled services can amplify even a short‑lived disruption.
When you notice a lag in instance launches, start by checking the AWS Service Health Dashboard and the regional status page. If the issue is confirmed, consider the following actions:
These steps help keep critical services running while you wait for the backlog to be cleared.
While outages can’t be prevented entirely, you can design your infrastructure to absorb their impact. Here are some practical strategies:
EC2:RunInstances API latency and trigger an alert if it exceeds a threshold.Incorporating these practices into your CI/CD pipeline turns a single point of failure into a distributed, self‑healing system.
AWS typically issues an incident report that includes a root‑cause analysis, a timeline, and a plan for remediation. In this case, the company committed to rolling out a hotfix within 12 hours and to revising the load‑balancer configuration to prevent a repeat. They also announced that the affected services would return to normal operation once the backlog was cleared.
During the outage, AWS offered temporary credits to customers who experienced prolonged service degradation. If you are eligible, check your AWS billing dashboard for any pending credit adjustments.
Operational disruptions are part of the cloud reality. The key is to keep a finger on the pulse of your services, to understand how a delay in one component can ripple through the stack, and to have a playbook ready for quick mitigation. By adding redundancy, monitoring, and automated fail‑over to your architecture, you can reduce the impact of future incidents and keep your users happy.
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