Amazon, most known for selling books, also rents out space on computers that run various other websites and online services. One of its data centers in Virginia started having problems on Thursday morning.
Amazon announced Saturday that progress is being made to fix the problem, but slower than they hoped. News-sharing site, Reddit, appeared to be functioning again.
On it’s website, Amazon posted that it removed some bottlenecks that stopped connections from its Virginia center, but another issue was holding up restoring all remaining connections. The company’s so-called “cloud” services in Northern California appear to be operating normally.
It has not been confirmed how exactly this many people have been inconvenienced, but the services being affected are used by millions. It also has yet to be revealed that Amazon’s computer problems have anything to do with the outage PlayStation is currently suffering from.
It’s not uncommon for Internet services to become inaccessible due to technical failures, sometimes for hours or even days. However, the outage is significant because Amazon’s servers are so commonly used.
Location-sharing social network Foursquare and HootSuite, which lets users monitor Twitter and other social networks more easily, appeared to have recovered.
Many other companies that utilize Amazon Web Services, like Netflix Inc. and Zynga Inc., which hosts Facebook games, were not hurt by the outage. Amazon has at least one other major U.S. data center that stayed up, in California.
Outages with Amazon’s services are rare, but not outlandish. In 2008, several companies lost access to their own files for about two hours when one of Amazon’s data centers failed.
Seattle-based Amazon has not responded to requests for comments in regards to the current issues.
photo: cleveland.com
