[Infowarrior] - Amazon Cloud Service Goes Down and Takes Popular Sites With It

[Richard Forno]

October 22, 2012, 3:58 pm17 Comments

Amazon Cloud Service Goes Down and Takes Popular Sites With It

By NICOLE PERLROTH

7:11 p.m. | Updated Updated throughout.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/amazon-cloud-service-goes-down-and-takes-some-popular-web-sites-with-it/

Some services at Amazon.com’s data centers went down Monday afternoon, taking with them a number of popular Web sites and services, including Flipboard and Foursquare.

Amazon reported problems at data centers in Northern Virginia that appeared to have had a ripple effect across the Internet, as many companies depend on the company’s cloud service to run their businesses. Several frustrated customers took to Twitter to complain.

In June, an electrical storm caused problems at the same Northern Virginia data centers and took down sites including Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram for a weekend.

The companies that were affected by the latest shutdown scrambled to respond.

“Like many other services, we’ve been taken down by the outage,” said Erin Gleason, a spokeswoman for Foursquare, the mobile check-in service. “Both the site and the app are inaccessible right now.”

Ms. Gleason said the company was still awaiting guidance and updates from Amazon about when its service might be restored.

Another start-up, Airbnb, attempted to reassure its members via Twitter. “Apologies. Our site is having a case of the Mondays,” the company posted.

Tera Randall, a representative for Amazon, said in an e-mail that the problems only involved one zone of the company’s service and were affecting “a portion of customers in that zone.” She declined to elaborate on when service might be restored or what percentage of the company’s overall cloud computing business was involved.

A status message on Amazon’s Web site said that the company’s cluster of cloud computing services in Virginia were “currently experiencing degraded performance.”

By late evening, at least one service that suffered as a result of the outage, Pinterest, showed signs of coming back to life.

“The site issues we were experiencing should be resolved and you can pin to your hearts content again,” the company wrote on Twitter. “Thanks again for your understanding!”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 22, 2012

In a previous version of this post, the full name of Amazon's EC2 Web service was given as Elastic Cloud Computing; it is Elastic Compute Cloud.


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