Amplify custom domain stuck FAILED — CNAME AlreadyExists, orphaned CloudFront distributions holding www CNAME

This is an issue involving an internal AWS account that you cannot resolve yourself.

As you correctly understand, when you configure a custom domain in Amplify Hosting, a CloudFront distribution is created within an internal AWS-owned account managed by the Amplify team. This distribution is completely invisible from your own account (which is precisely why list-distributions returns an empty result), and naturally, you cannot delete or edit it yourself.

The steps you have taken represent the correct initial troubleshooting procedure:

• Verifying that there are no conflicting domain associations in your account
• Verifying that no CNAMEs for the domain are registered in your account's CloudFront distributions
• Verifying that the Cloudflare DNS records exactly match Amplify's requirements
• Deleting the domain association to ensure a clean state and waiting beyond the six-hour grace period

If the issue persists after performing all these steps, it indicates a flaw in the cleanup process on the Amplify backend (within the internal account)—something that cannot be resolved from your account side. Multiple reports of this same pattern (where an alias remains in the internal account even after the domain has been deleted) have been documented in GitHub Issues (such as aws-amplify/amplify-hosting #2583 and #2713).

When an AWS Amplify custom domain association fails with a CNAME AlreadyExistsException, it typically means that the domain name is already associated with another CloudFront distribution. Since Amplify Hosting uses CloudFront distributions that are managed in AWS-owned accounts (which is why you don't see them in your own CloudFront console), you've correctly identified that you cannot directly remove these aliases yourself.

You've taken the right troubleshooting steps by confirming that no other Amplify apps in your account are using the domain, verifying your DNS configuration at Cloudflare matches Amplify's requirements, and ensuring no CloudFront distributions in your own account hold the CNAME. An issue with orphaned distributions holding onto the alternate domain names after deletion requires AWS Support intervention.

To resolve this situation, you'll need to contact AWS Support directly through the AWS Support Center at https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/. When you open your support case, provide the details you've shared: your Amplify App ID (dkpa6hlzkei0y), region (us-east-1), the domain names (wicketkart.com and www.wicketkart.com), and a description of the issue including the error message and troubleshooting steps you've already completed. AWS Support has the backend access needed to identify and release the alternate domain names from the orphaned CloudFront distributions.

The support team will be able to investigate the Amplify-managed CloudFront distributions and manually release the CNAME records so you can successfully associate your custom domain with your Amplify app. If you have a paid support plan, you may receive a faster response time based on your plan's severity level options.