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AWS Health Dashboard

The AWS Health Dashboard (health.aws.amazon.com) is Amazon Web Services' official service-health disclosure surface. It publishes first-party, provider-attributed event notifications scoped to specific regions, services, and account access: when AWS considers a service in a region to be degraded, an event appears on the dashboard with operational framing, impact scope, and recovery guidance.

Unlike the legacy AWS Service Health Dashboard (SHD) — which was often criticised for under-reporting or slow acknowledgement — the Health Dashboard operates at finer granularity (per-region, per-service, with personalised account-scoped views) and serves as the canonical record of provider-acknowledged events.

Event structure

Each AWS Health event page carries:

  • Event ARN — a stable identifier like arn:aws:health:me-central-1::event/MULTIPLE_SERVICES/AWS_MULTIPLE_SERVICES_OPERATIONAL_ISSUE/….
  • Affected regions / services — scoped event targeting.
  • Event timeline — with status updates posted as the incident evolves.
  • Impact description — plain-prose explanation of what the affected services' behaviour looks like.
  • Guidance — actions customers should take (migrate, retry, wait, etc.).

Role in the 2026-03 Middle East incident (canonical wiki instance)

Following the drone strikes on AWS facilities in me-central-1 (UAE) and me-south-1 (Bahrain) on March 1-2, 2026, the AWS Health Dashboard served as the provider's official statement of the damage. The event post (cited in the Cloudflare Q1 2026 Internet-disruption review):

"These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage."

The post went further with operational guidance:

AWS warned customers that regional instability was likely to continue, making operations "unpredictable," and urged customers with workloads in the affected regions "to back up their data or migrate to other AWS regions."

This is a landmark instance of the dashboard's framing — it named the mechanism (drone strikes, structural damage, fire-suppression water damage), acknowledged a continuing threat environment, and advised customer migration. Ordinary service-degradation events on the dashboard rarely carry this level of structural or physical-damage detail; a kinetic attack produces an unusually detailed disclosure.

Dashboard vs. third-party observability

The Health Dashboard is first-party — AWS's own view of what it considers operationally affected. It has several characteristic limits:

  • Disclosure latency — AWS has to assess, confirm, and editorially release an event before it appears. Third-party observability (e.g. Cloudflare Cloud Observatory connection-failure-rate graphs) can pick up the same degradation in real time, before the dashboard acknowledges it.
  • Framing — the dashboard describes customer-facing impact in terms AWS chooses. Physical damage, for example, might be described as "power delivery disruption" even when the underlying cause is a strike.
  • Scope — the dashboard reports on AWS's services, not on connectivity from external networks. A customer in an Asia or Africa region that cannot reach AWS because of external connectivity issues (not AWS's fault) will not see an event on the dashboard.

Pairing Health Dashboard events with independent observability from Cloudflare Cloud Observatory (for external-callers' view) and ThousandEyes (for path-level forensics) gives the most complete picture during hyperscaler-scale incidents.

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