Amazon Broke The Cloud

Late last night most of our social services like Foursquare and HootSuit suddenly went down with out a reason to why this happened. This was not their fault at all, in fact it was the hosts fault. Amazon Web Services, which is a cloud-based environment that runs many high level projects had a major fault and crashed their servers causing a ripple effect through the internet.

Some the the critical Amazon Web Services, which working together provide the company’s cloud platform are experiencing some technical difficulties. Major sites like Foursquare, HootSuit, Reddit and many other web projects the rely on the Amazon cloud are either down or have recently experienced downtime or latency issues. Other sites such as Formspring and Quora seem to be partly down as well from this outage.

On the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard, it shows problems with multiple services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, which are used to power most of the sites.

On the status dashboard Amazon acknowledges the problem and has been posting periodic updates to let users know what seems to be the issue. Amazon is currently “investigating latency and error rates” and will keep us updated