In the same week that a lightning strike in Dublin knocked out service for some European users of Amazon and Microsoft's cloud services, Amazon also suffered a stateside cloud outage that affected popular services like Foursquare, Reddit, and Netflix.
According to Amazon's service dashboard, the company's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS) experienced a service disruption in Northern Virginia yesterday around 10pm Eastern time. Service for both services was restored just after 11pm, but not before impacting some of its high-profile users.
"We're aware that some members are experiencing issues streaming movies and TV shows. We’re working to resolve the problem," Netflix tweeted last night. The problems were resolved about two hours later.
Last night, Reddit also reported "issues communicating with Amazon EC2," and tweeted later that " Amazon's US-EAST data centers have all dropped off the internet." Reddit was back online about 11 hours ago, but at that point, Reddit said it had not yet hard any updates on the situation from Amazon.
"We're currently down due to the Amazon EC2 outage," Foursquare also tweeted last night. The service was back online just after 11pm.
Photo app Instagram also experienced some downtime, the company said last night.
According to CRN, the issues happened after Amazon network traffic was "executed incorrectly." Instead of shifting to another router, traffic went to a lower-capacity network, taking down servers in Northern Virginia.
Also this week, a lightning strike near an Amazon data center in Ireland caused an explosion and fire that knocked out utility service and left it unable to start its generators, resulting in a total power outage. Microsoft's hosted online services were offline for about four hours, preventing access to its services for that time, based on a "power issue."
Amazon experienced a more widespread cloud outage back in April.