Amazon EC2 goes down, taking with it Reddit, Foursquare and Quora

Cloud computing is all very well until someone trips over a wire and the whole thing goes dark.

Reddit, Foursquare and Quora were among the sites affected by Amazon Web Services suffering network latency and connectivity errors this morning, according to the company’s own status dashboard.

Amazon says performance issues affected instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and its Relational Database Service, and it’s “continuing to work towards full resolution”. These are hosted in its North Virginia data centre.

1:48 AM PDT We are currently investigating connectivity and latency issues with RDS database instances in the US-EAST-1 region.
2:16 AM PDT We can confirm connectivity issues impacting RDS database instances across multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region.
3:05 AM PDT We are continuing to see connectivity issues impacting some RDS database instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Some Multi AZ failovers are taking longer than expected. We continue to work towards resolution.
4:03 AM PDT We are making progress on failovers for Multi AZ instances and restore access to them. This event is also impacting RDS instance creation times in a single Availability Zone. We continue to work towards the resolution.

European-based startups affected include Paper.li and Mobypicture.

Quora even has a fun ‘down’ message: “We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.” And this YouTube video: