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Amazon Broke the Internet Again

Reddit
Rebecca Greenfield 3,297 Views Oct 22, 2012

Earlier today a bunch of sites, including the front page of the Internet itself, weren't working because Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute service, or EC2, which hosts many websites sites, was down. As Beta Beat's Jessica Roy notes, when Internetters went to Reddit.com they got the pleasant (but also horrifying) message above. For some, the problem still persists. But it's working fine from the Wire's D.C. office (our New York HQ is still Reddit-less) and TechCrunch's Roman Dillet confirms it's back to normal for "most people." Reddit Status, the Twitter handle that first acknowledged the "network related issue," however hasn't said everything is "back to normal." In addition to Reddit, Roy notes GitHubHerokuImgurTurntableAirbnb and MongoLab are also not working. The Next Web's Brad McCarty adds Coursera, Flipboard, FastCompany, and VYou to that list.

Amazon has caused an Internet outage like this before, breaking Reddit and other favorite Internet sites for a few hours. No word from Amazon yet confirming this hiccup, but its health dashboard indicates the following issue:

10:38 AM PDT We are currently investigating degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.

11:11 AM PDT We can confirm degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances using affected EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance.

11:26 AM PDT We are currently experiencing degraded performance for EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. New launches for EBS backed instances are failing and instances using affected EBS volumes will experience degraded performance.

While Reddit is working fine, those other sites are still down. 

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