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

By Aemon Malone 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.

“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.

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