Reddit Downed: Amazon Network Outages Take Down Imgur, Netflix, Pinterest And Foursquare, Among Other Services

By Lisa Eadicicco | October 22 2012 4:23 PM

An issue with Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute network caused outages of websites Reddit, Imgur, Airbnb, and others on Monday afternoon. Video streaming service Netflix was also experiencing technical problems.

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Reddit, the widely popular social news site that attracts about 35 million visitors per month, became inaccessible just before 2 p.m. EST on Monday. At roughly 4:15 p.m., however, the site seems to be up and running again.

“Site is having some problems down for some. We’re working on it,” tweeted the official Reddit Twitter account earlier this afternoon.

“The site is down right now. It appears to be a network-related issue. We are investigating,” tweeted the Reddit account an hour later.

Erik Martin, general manager at Reddit, confirmed to Mashable that the website was down “due to an Amazon issue.” Before becoming completely inaccessible, the website was believed to be partially intact for some users. Pages were loading slowly for those who could get on to the site, according to The Huffington Post.

Netflix was also currently experiencing “likely service disruptions,” according to service monitoring website DownRightNow.com.

The issue originated with Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (ECS2) in North Virginia, which has impacted services such as Foursquare, Pinterest, Minecraft and Heroku in addition to those mentioned above, reported TechCrunch. However, all of these websites are back up as of 4:15 p.m. EST.

“Hi Pinners, we are currently experiencing site issues and working hard to resolve this as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience,” the official Pinterest Twitter account posted.

“We are currently investigating degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the UA-EAST01 Region,” Amazon’s Web Service page posted at 10:30 am Monday morning.

The page was updated approximately one hour later to say that Amazon Web Services experienced “degraded performance” in EBS [Elastic Block Store] volumes.

Amazon outages have also brought down Instagram in June when the online retailer’s EC2 network was knocked out due to weather conditions.

We’ll update this story as the situation progresses.