Amazon Web Services Takes Down Reddit, Foursquare and Quora with It

Cloud computing sure is great. You get flexible billing, all the storage you need when you need it and generally get to enjoy a much less stressful life. That is, unless the cloud goes down, in which case you're stuck with an unworkable site, angry customers and users and nothing to do except wait around for your provider to fix the issues.

That's exactly how Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, Hootsuite and most likely many others are feeling right now, since an Amazon Web Services data center went down taking everything down with it.

On the bright side, you get to enjoy the cute outage messages all of these websites have put up while they wait for Amazon to fix their service. The "Reddit is down" image is pretty funny, for example.

"We can confirm connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances and increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Increased error rates are affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We continue to work towards resolution," Amazon wrote on its AWS status dashboard a couple of hours ago.

Amazon says it has started to fix the issues and that one of the "availability zone" is recovering and it's working on the second. However, it didn't provide an estimated service recovery time frame.

"EBS volume latency and API errors have recovered in one of the two impacted Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. We are continuing to work to resolve the issues in the second impacted Availability Zone. The errors, which started at 12:55AM PDT, began recovering at 2:55am PDT," the latest update from Amazon reads.

Both Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service as well as the Relational Database Service, both based in North Virginia on the US East coast, are experiencing problems. Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk is affected as well.