Major web sites such as Reddit are currently experiencing outages today due to issues at a Northern Virgina-based cloud server operation hosted by Amazon. According to a message from Amazon's Service Health Dashboard:
We are currently experiencing degraded performance for EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. New launches for EBS backed instances are failing and instances using affected EBS volumes will experience degraded performance.
The outage started around 1:38 pm Eastern Time and Reddit has been bouncing off and on as of this writing, showing its visitors its rather friendly and cute message above. Venture Beat reports that other sites affected by the Amazon outage include Airbnb, Flipboard, Coursera and more.
This is not the first time that Amazon's cloud servers in Northern Virginia have had problems. In July, a massive electrical storm caused several of those servers to go offline for several hours. This caused services such as Netflix and Instagram, among others, to be inaccessible for that period of time. At the time, Amazon said a backup generator that failed to kick in was part of the reason for the outages. There's no word yet on what specifically is causing today's issues.
Source: Amazon | Image via Reddit
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