Northern Virginia Amazon AWS data center suffering downtime
updated 05:25 pm EDT, Mon October 22, 2012
Many popular sites affected, no estimated time for full recovery
Amazon web services has confirmed on a status page that is it suffering from "degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes" in a single availability zone centered on Northern Virginia. Affected sites Reddit, Imgur, Pinterest, GitHub, and Gamespot are experiencing intermittent service disruptions as a result of the outage, particularly for web surfers living in geographical proximity to the Herndon, VA-based data center.
Some progress has already been made on repairing the downed services. The outage includes cloud-based storage service EBS, application deployment service Elastic Beanstalk, and Amazon's relational database service. Amazon has no comment as to what is causing the connectivity problem, nor has it commented on estimated recovery time.
Historic thunderstorms in Northern Virginia caused power outages in late June for the Northern VA Amazon data center, causing the same level of disruption to hosted services. A similar outage occurred in parallel with a European outage in 2011.
