Amazon experiencing troubles with cloud servers, Reddit and Quora among affected sites

By Aemon Malone Published April 21, 2011

Earlier this morning, some of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) servers failed, causing several high-profile websites to go down. Sites affected by the outage include Reddit, Quora, Foursquare and HootSuite.

The failed servers compromise a portion of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), a cloud computing package used by companies to run their websites. The EC2 outage occurred with servers based in Northern Virginia, where Amazon’s AWS infrastructure for the East Coast is based. The outage struck at 1:41 PT, according to CNET and appears to be an ongoing issue.

Recommended Videos

“Amazon is currently experiencing a degradation. They are working on it.” reads a note posted on Reddit, which, as of this writing, appears to be mostly operational.

Although a few sites now appear to be back up and running. Others, including Quora and Hootsuite, remain inaccessible.

A check of Amazon’s AWS “Service Health Dashboard” indicates ongoing problems with the servers. An update posted at 7:40 PT reads, “In addition to the EBS volume latencies, EBS-backed instances in the US-EAST-1 region are failing at a high rate. This is due to a high error rate for creating new volumes in this region.” Amazon is obviously still “working on it.”

Amazon has not yet indicated a time for when it expects to have services fully restored.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Topics

Computing

DigUp lets users find Mac files by describing them, not remembering their names

Can't remember where that screenshot, PDF or recording went? Just describe it and let AI do the digging.

DigUp App in Use screenshot

There's a particular kind of frustration that comes with knowing a file exists somewhere on a computer but having absolutely no idea what it's called. Was that screenshot saved as IMG_4837? Which PDF contained that clause? And where did that podcast recording mention the thing worth remembering? DigUp wants to end the filename guessing game, letting Mac users search for files by describing what they remember instead. The free, open-source app uses Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 to search across photos, documents, PDFs, audio recordings and videos, all without sending personal files to the cloud.

DigUp turns everyday descriptions into file searches

Computing

A new AI detector looks beyond words to check whether the ideas came from AI

This could help journals distinguish AI-written research from human work polished with AI.

ai-writing-book

Most AI detectors look for telltale signs of AI-generated text by examining word and sentence patterns. A new tool called IdeaLens takes a different route to solving this problem. It spots AI-generated research by looking at the ideas behind it instead of the wording itself (via TechXplore).

Researchers from the University of Maryland, Google DeepMind, and Simon Fraser University built IdeaLens to check whether a document's core arguments came from a human or a machine, regardless of who wrote the final draft.

Computing

Anthropic warns of imminent self-replicating AI that might even work off an oven or TV

Self-replicating AI could be merely months away, and tests show it can run on the devices sitting at your home.

Illustration of dangerous AI.

Over the past few weeks, nearly every AI lab has released frontier AI models. Earlier today, Google started rolling out Gemini 4, Argon, hot on the heels of Meta announcing its Muse Wonder frontier AI models to compete against the best from OpenAI and Anthropic's Claude. This relentless pace of AI model release comes at a time when the same AI labs are calling for development slowdown and increased regulation, following a series of concerning incidents where these AI models went rogue and broke into private, as well as government-owned, websites.

Now, Anthropic has dropped a chilling set of predictions about the capabilities of these AI models after running a series of tests. The company claims that small AI models could be merely a few months away from self-replicating and turning into a dangerous swarm. More importantly, they won't require a massive data center or an uber-powerful computer to do so. On the contrary, the lab claims that these self-replicating AI swarms will need something with as little computing power as an average Internet-connected device, like a smart oven or an Android TV box.