Amazon's data centers in Northern Virginia crashed Monday afternoon, taking with it a number of popular Web sites, from Someecards, the quirky e-card company, to mobile applications like Flipboard and Foursquare.
Amazon reported having problems with the data centers in Northern Virginia. Those problems appear to have had a ripple effect across the Internet with several sites hosted on Amazon's popular EC2 cloud hosting service also reporting problems.
Several frustrated customers took to Twitter Monday to complain that they could not get access to Web sites including Foursquare, turntable.fm and Flipboard. It appears that some of the affected services then affected services that, in turn, ran on them. Because they are all hosted on Amazon's cloud service, there is a ripple effect. They all go down when the original hosting servers go down.
Last June, an electrical storm caused problems at the same Northern Virginia data centers and took down sites includ ing Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram for a weekend.
The companies that were affected by the latest shutdown were scrambling to respond.
“Like many other services, we've been taken down by the outage,†said Erin Gleason, a spokeswoman for Foursquare, the mobile check-in service. “Both the site and the app are inaccessible right now.â€
Ms. Gleason said the company was still awaiting guidance and updates from Amazon about when its service might be restored.
“Hoping to get things back up and running ASAP,†she said.
Amazon has not yet responded to requests for comment. A status message on Amazon's Web site that pertains to the company's cluster of cloud computing services in Virginia, also known as Elastic Cloud Computing, or EC2, stated that they were “currently experiencing degraded performance.â€
