Amazon web hosting outage hits multiple sites

Yesterday, a number of sites went down as something at Amazon’s cloud computing centre in North Virginia went pop.

The BBC reports that the major outage left a large number of major websites unavailable for considerable chunks of yesterday.

These included Foursquare, Reddit and Quora, who all use EC2, Amazon’s cloud computing business, for processing power and data storage.

Some services found themselves downed completely, whereas other sites experienced slow-down and technical hitches.

There are some remaining issues with the North Virginia centre this morning, as the Amazon Web Services monitoring page still cites: “Instance connectivity, latency and error rates”.

At 2am this morning (UK time) Amazon posted: “At this point, all Availability Zones except one have been functioning normally for the past 5 hours. We have stabilized the remaining Availability Zone, but recovery is taking longer than we originally expected.”

The latest update was posted at 7am this morning: “Just a short note to let you know that the team continues to be all-hands on deck trying to add capacity to the affected Availability Zone to re-mirror stuck volumes. It’s taking us longer than we anticipated to add capacity to this fleet. When we have an updated ETA or meaningful new update, we will make sure to post it here [On the AWS Service Health Dashboard].”