In a chilling reminder that no site or service is infallible, an outage of one of Amazon’s cloud computing data centers knocked out popular sites like Reddit, Foursquare Pinterest and TMZ for some users on Monday.
The outages, which began early afternoon Eastern time, appeared to be gradually improving as the afternoon went on. As of about 5 p.m. ET, Amazon Web Services was reporting “degraded” performance at one of its centers in northern Virginia.
In addition to online retail, Amazon rents cloud storage space for clients to store Web data.
Other sites that were impacted included Instagram, Flipboard, AirBnB, Imgur and GetGlue.
From Amazon:
11:11 AM PDT We can confirm degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances using affected EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance.
11:26 AM PDT We are currently experiencing degraded performance for EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. New launches for EBS backed instances are failing and instances using affected EBS volumes will experience degraded performance.