Amazon Web Services experienced an outage on Monday that resulted in downtime for many popular web destinations and services. Issues began at a Northern Virginia data center that caused a chain reaction across the Internet spanning several hours.
It started out innocently enough as a few major websites and services like Github, Minecraft and Reddit were among the first affected. As the day progressed, more sites and services were added to the list. Before it was all said and done, Airbnb, FastCompany, Fliboard, FourSquare and Pinterest were all experiencing downtime.
Frustrated site owners and readers took to Twitter to voice their concerns and let people know what was going on.
Amazon hasn't offered up an official explanation as of writing but a spokesperson did point out that the outage was not the result of a hacking attempt as claimed by Anonymous. Tera Randall from Amazon said the problems were limited to a single zone of the company's service, thus only affecting customers in that zone.
A quick check of most services reveals business as usual but there's no doubt that some are a bit concerned by the outage. After all, this isn't the first time that Amazon Web Services have suffered massive outages.
A major storm knocked out a large chunk of Amazon's EC2 service in July, resulting in downtime for Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest. Similar events took place in April 2011 that affected the Amazon EC2 service and Amazon RDS Service.