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AWS CloudFront outage knocks Hugging Face offline
An AWS CloudFront failure on July 16 caused 5xx errors for VPC Origins users, disrupting services including Hugging Face and the UK National Lottery.
Image: The Register
Amazon Web Services suffered another outage on July 16, 2026, this time tied to CloudFront and severe enough to take down sites and apps including Hugging Face and the UK’s National Lottery.
According to AWS, the problem began at 01:45 PDT (09:45 UTC) and affected CloudFront customers using VPC Origins, a newer feature that lets customers serve applications behind private load balancers through CloudFront without exposing back-end infrastructure to the public internet. Customers using other origin types were not affected.
AWS said users who could do without VPC Origins should temporarily switch origin types while engineers worked on a fix.
“We are experiencing increased 5xx errors for CloudFront customers utilizing VPC Origins connectivity.”
At 03:18 PDT (10:18 UTC), AWS said it believed the root cause was tied to a packet processing subsystem that routes requests from CloudFront edge locations to resources inside customer VPCs. Users hitting affected services were shown an error page saying the app or website could not connect to its server and suggesting they try again later.
The outage quickly hit public-facing services. Hugging Face said its platform was unavailable “from most regions in the world” because of the AWS disruption. The UK’s National Lottery told users on X that its website and mobile app were unavailable due to what it described as a broader AWS outage. Fallout 76 players also reported access problems on Reddit, alongside complaints from other AWS customers seeing CloudFront distributions return 5xx errors while the rest of AWS appeared to be operating normally.
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Later, in an update posted at 17:39 UTC on July 16, 2026, AWS said it had identified the root cause as “an internal constraint on the fleet that manages connections to private VPC origins.” Once that limit was hit, the system distributing routing configuration to network processors failed to load updated configuration data correctly, affecting routing for VPC Origin connections. AWS said mitigation steps led to a full recovery, and customers that had temporarily changed origin types could safely switch back.
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Marcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.
via The Register
