Internet chaos as US Amazon EC2 goes offline

Amazon EC2 in US-East experienced a major outage today, with major sites across the web that rely on their services going down. These sites include Foursquare, Reddit (pictured below), 500px, CloudApp and other major outfits.

The Amazon status website currently says there were "network connectivity" issues with North Virginia for up to 30 minutes and ongoing issues with RDS databases and the internet. It appears all hosts within the "US-East availability zone" went down. The purpose of the availability zone is to allow the service to be accessible during an outage such as this, but it failed in this instance.  

During the outage the Amazon EC2 forums erupted with users complaining about the services being down. One user on the forum said; "ALWAYS DOWN, network of ec2 us east is unavaiable at all, why paying?." Another user said he was leaving the service immediately, stating "Awesome. Down again! Even tho it has been 30 minutes, I am moving everything over to Storm on Demand." 

For those who aren't familiar with Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud), is a service that lets customers rent computer resources from "the EC2 cloud" and "provides storage, processing, and Web services to customers." The service is extremely popular and many major websites and services rely on it to operate.

It is not yet known what the cause of the outage was, but it is likely to leave many customers questioning the volatility of the service, considering how many major outages it has experienced this year. The news of this outage comes hot on the heels of Amazon experiencing a major issue in Ireland, where their datacenter was struck by lightning, causing an ongoing outage for many users.

Update 1: It appears parts of EC2 are coming back online partially, but appear to be up ittermittently.

Update 2: Services now appear stable, however some major sites that rely on EC2 are still unavailable.

Update 3: Services have now been fully restored, according to the dashboard.