Amazon EC2 outage cripples range of websites
updated 10:40 pm EDT, Thu April 21, 2011
Services down for the majority of Thursday
Amazon's EC2 cloud services have been hit with a significant outage that was first announced after 4:30am EDT Thursday and remained unresolved later in the evening. The problems have affected a number of websites, including Foursquare and Reddit. The problems appear to be limited to Amazon's northern Virginia data center, rather than a widespread issue affecting all of the company's centers.
Amazon's Service Health Dashboard lists updates to the situation, which was first expected to be resolved early in the afternoon. However, the company at 6pm admitted that it would take "several more hours" to recover a number of volumes that still caused problems.
"Reddit is in 'emergency read-only mode' right now because Amazon is experiencing degradation." Reddit posted. "They are working on it but we are still waiting for them to get to our volumes."
It remains unclear if the widespread problem will have a negative impact on the industry's willingness to embrace Amazon's EC2 services or other 'cloud computing' alternatives.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Mar 2009
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Reddit constantly has problems with its amazon service, there was a major outage just a couple weeks ago before that, the site usually goes down once a week.