AWS issues brought down Ring camera features for a few hours

Ring camera users experienced a brief outage of several key features several hours ago due to issues with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The problem, which affected AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, caused disruptions to multiple Ring systems, including Live View, Recordings, Timeline, and Event History.

The outage began around 6:40 PM ET on July 30 and lasted for several hours, as reported by The Verge, with Ring confirming the issue on their status page. Many users reported being unable to access their camera history or view events, although some were still able to access live feeds from their devices.

One Ring user on Reddit commented, “I’ve been resetting everything thinking it was me,” highlighting the confusion many customers experienced during the outage. Another user noted, “I turned my phone off twice,” believing the problem was with their device.

An update on the AWS Health dashboard highlighted the root cause of the issue and mentioned that engineers were “actively working on multiple parallel paths to mitigate the issue.” The outage affected 41 AWS services, impacting not only Ring but potentially other internet services relying on AWS infrastructure.

As the outage progressed, Ring kept users informed through their status page. By 2:21 UTC on July 31, Ring reported that a fix had been implemented and many of their services were starting to recover. The company continued to monitor the situation, and by 5:20 UTC, they announced that the incident had been fully resolved.

While the outage was relatively short-lived, it did cause concern among some Ring users, particularly those who rely on their cameras for home security. One Reddit user expressed anxiety about not being able to access their cameras, stating, “I can’t sleep tonight. I have an autistic child. We rely on cameras for safety.”

As services return to normal, Ring users are encouraged to check their devices and ensure all features are functioning correctly.