A number of well-known Web sites and online services were completely unavailable earlier today due to problems with Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Amazon Web Services.
Foursquare, Reddit, Hootsuite, and Quora were among the largest and most visible sites affected.
Amazon EC2 is a service that provides processing power and storage to Web sites and businesses via the cloud. Amazon EC2 is part of the larger Web Services division of Amazon, which provides other business solutions as well, including networking, database provision, and payment and billing.
While many North American consumers slept through a large part of the outage, which started early on Thursday, Web users on other continents experienced the downtime during peak business hours. Some services seem to have been restored around 10:30 a.m. Eastern time.
During the downtime, Foursquare was able to post an apology on its homepage, explaining there was a problem with an otherwise reliable service. Reddit's reaction was a lot more direct. It sent a public message via Twitter to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels reading, "@werner @reddit has been down for 5.5 hours now. Please tell them to fix our volumes. Thanks."
Reddit.com is now live, though a notice on the site reads, "Amazon is currently experiencing a degradation. They are working on it. We are still waiting on them to get to our volumes. Sorry."
The Hootsuite Web site is still inaccessible. "Our web hosting provider (EC2) is still working hard resolving the service disruption. We will keep you posted," the company tweeted several hours ago.
Quora is also still down. "We're currently having an unexpected outage, and are working to get the site back up as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience," the site said.
Amazon is reportedly "working towards resolution" of the problems.
Late last year, Amazon EC2 was in the news when it pulled the plug on a mirrored WikiLeaks site that it had been hosting. Nothing has yet surfaced to suggest that hackers caused today's issues, although retaliation has been the primary way WikiLeaks supporters have expressed their disapproval of companies that denied service to the organization.