Amazon Web Services outage reported, users say it happened earlier

If it happened once, it can happen again, just like how lightning strikes the same place many times over in a lifetime. Amazon Web Services has experienced yet another outage, taking down numerous websites with it along the way, and this bit of unflattering news comes five months after storms ensured Amazon-powered sites like Instagram, Pinterest and Netflix were thrust into “disabled” mode. Issues Amazon’s Northern Virginia data center certainly gave Amazon Web Services customers headaches earlier today, with the outage reported by Amazon to have begun at around 2:11pm Eastern Time, while affecting “a small number” of instances in Amazon Web Services’s US-EAST-1 Region.

According to AWS’ Service Help Dashboard, the Northern Virginia data center is experiencing “Degraded EBS performance in a single Availability Zone” that appeared to take down or severely degrade performance of sites including Reddit, Flipboard, Airbnb, and Github.

As of Monday night, Amazon mentioned that they have already restored normal performance to approximately 50% of the instances affected, but were not bold enough to provide an actual timeframe for a full service restoration. Such downtimes will certainly affect Internet businesses as well as general users, as many of us now store our stuff on the cloud. Were you one of those parties affected?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Amazon