Another day, another AWS outage rippling across the internet, and this time the culprit is a feature most people have never heard of: CloudFront’s VPC Origins.
The trouble started at 0145 PDT this morning, when AWS began throwing 5xx errors for CloudFront customers using VPC Origins, a relatively new feature that lets companies serve applications behind private load balancers without exposing their backend infrastructure directly to the public internet. AWS confirmed the issue on its status page, noting that customers using other origin types hadn’t run into problems, and suggested anyone who could switch origin types temporarily should do so while engineers worked on a fix.
By 0318 PDT, AWS said engineers had traced the likely root cause to a packet processing subsystem that routes requests from CloudFront’s edge locations into customer VPCs. The company promised another update within the hour and kept repeating the same workaround: switch origin types if you can.
Users trying to reach affected sites ran into a blunt error page saying the server couldn’t be reached, with a vague suggestion to try again later. Hugging Face was among the earliest and most visible casualties, confirming its service had gone down across most regions worldwide while it scrambled to work around the outage. The UK’s National Lottery hit the same wall, telling players on X that its website and app were down due to what it called a wider AWS outage, and advising anyone chasing a jackpot to just refresh later.
Even gamers didn’t escape it. Fallout 76 players flooded Reddit wondering why Bethesda’s wasteland had gone even quieter than usual, joining a growing pile of threads from AWS customers who all reported the identical symptom: CloudFront throwing 5xx errors while everything else on AWS kept humming along normally.
AWS hadn’t disclosed a root cause as of this writing and didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The company described the outage as limited to a single CloudFront configuration, but based on the sprawl of affected services, from AI platforms to state lotteries to video games, “limited” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
