SCVNGR and other sites took to Twitter after a rare and major outage of Amazon’s cloud-based Web service. By Julianne Pepitone, staff reporterApril 21, 2011: 3:47 PM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — A rare and major outage of Amazon’s cloud-based Web service on Thursday took down a plethora of other online sites, including Reddit, HootSuite, Foursquare and Quora.
On its Web services “Health Dashboard,” Amazon says that it is “investigating instance connectivity, latency and error rates” that started at 4:41 a.m. ET Thursday . The outages are at Amazon’s northern Virginia data center.
Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) hosts many major websites on its web servers through a service called EC2. The “elastic” infrastructure model is designed to scale up automatically to handle giant traffic spikes — the kind Amazon gets every year during its December e-commerce rush.
Thousands of customers hitch a ride on Amazon’s cloud, renting space on its servers. Some of them went down Thursday in the wake of Amazon’s outage.
Amazon representatives did not immediately return calls for comment.
Who was crashed: Q&A site Quora posted on its homepage: “We’ll be back shortly, we hope. Sorry – it sucks for us too. We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.”
News aggregator Reddit had resumed some functionality by midday, but it still noted on its homepage that “Amazon is experiencing a degradation…We are still waiting on them to get to our volumes.”
Foursquare suffered some glitches earlier in the day, but its site seemed to be functioning normally by early afternoon.
Another location-based service, SCVNGR, tweeted: “The sky is falling! Amazon’s cloud seems to be down (raining?) so we’re experiencing some issues too. Be back soon!”
Popular Twitter client HootSuite posted its avian-inspired “homepage down” message: “Owls need a break sometimes too. We’ll be back in action shortly — in the meantime go outside and flap your arms around, you may find that flying ain’t very easy.”
Jason Glassberg, co-founder of security outfit Casaba LLC, called the issue “a big ol’ black eye” for Amazon.
“Reliability is probably the No. 1 concern with cloud services,” he said. “Amazon has worked long and hard to convince folks that their services were robust. This does not help the cause.”