Amazon EC2 outage downs Reddit, Quora and Foursquare

PROBLEMS at Amazon's North Virginia datacentre have knocked over services at Web 2.0 websites including Quora, Reddit and Foursquare.

Amazon's AWS health service dashboard shows a problem at the datacentre that has run on for a few hours. Currently it is showing a warning for latency and error rates, but the issues first arose some six hours ago at press time.

The most recent update at 7:40am PDT reports, "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."

Some customer websites, such as news sharing service Reddit, have published their own information about the problems.

"Amazon is currently experiencing a degredation", wrote Reddit. "We are still waiting for them to get to our volumes. Sorry".

"We're currently having an unexpected outage and are working to get the site back up as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience," said Quora.

Enter Foursquare, which added more kindly, "Hi all, Our usually-amazing datacenter hosts, Amazon EC2, are having a few hiccups this morning, which affected us and a bunch of other services that use them. Everything looks to be getting back to normal now. We'll update this when we have the all clear. Thanks for your patience."

Patience is a virtue, but it can become a challenge when required by online services. µ