Widespread DNS Failures Disrupt Online Services

A significant outage affecting Amazon CloudFront’s DNS infrastructure on February 10, 2026, cascaded into failures across multiple AWS services and impacted a broad range of downstream platforms. The incident, which began around 9:15 PM UTC, resulted in DNS resolution failures, effectively making services inaccessible to users.

Timeline of the Outage and Recovery

The initial DNS issue was largely resolved within approximately one hour. But, full recovery, including the propagation of changes to new distributions, DNS records and TLS certificate provisioning, extended until around 4:00 AM UTC on February 11, 2026.

• Initial Impact (9:15 PM UTC, Feb 10): CloudFront began returning NXDOMAIN responses for DNS queries.
• One-Hour Resolution: Core DNS resolution issues were addressed within the first hour.
• Full Recovery (4:00 AM UTC, Feb 11): Complete propagation of changes and restoration of all services.

Affected AWS Services

The CloudFront outage had a ripple effect, impacting the following AWS services:

• Amazon Route 53
• Amazon API Gateway
• AWS WAF
• AWS AppSync
• Amazon Pinpoint
• AWS Transfer Family
• Amazon VPC Lattice

According to reports, the outage extended beyond AWS, affecting platforms such as Salesforce, Adobe, Discord, and Claude.

Early Detection and Response

Crowd-sourced monitoring tools detected problems approximately 23 minutes before AWS issued its first status update, highlighting the value of independent monitoring systems for early incident detection.

On February 10, 2026, AWS CloudFront experienced DNS resolution failures that cascaded across 8 AWS services and impacted 20+ downstream platforms — from Salesforce and Adobe to Discord and Claude. isdown.app/blog/aws-cloudfront-outage-february-2026

Terraform and CloudFront Management

For those managing CloudFront distributions using Terraform, the aws_cloudfront_distribution resource provides comprehensive configuration options. Further examples of complete configurations can be found on GitHub.

FAQ

What caused the CloudFront outage?

The outage was caused by a DNS resolution failure within CloudFront’s infrastructure.

How long did the outage last?

The initial DNS issue was resolved within an hour, but full recovery took until approximately 4:00 AM UTC on February 11, 2026.

Which services were affected?

Eight AWS services were directly impacted, and over 20 downstream platforms experienced disruptions.