Update: An Amazon spokeswoman referred TechRadar to the AWS Service Health Dashboard, which indicated service availability at Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service and AWS Elastic Beanstalk were all experiencing "performance issues."
All three services are in the Northern Virginia "Availability Zone" and the disruptions are "impacting a portion of customers in that Availability Zone," the spokeswoman said.
She did not elaborate which specific sites and services have been affected and when service should return to normal.
Earlier reports
Problems with Amazon Web Services (AWS) are reportedly impacting several sites and services around the web, including Reddit, Pinterest and Foursquare.
The reports started coming in around 12 pm PDT Tuesday, indicating issues at the company's EC2 operations at a Northern Virginia data center were causing a ripple effect of disruption.
Flipboard, Pitchfork, "Minecraft," Skitch, Coursera, GitHub, Airbnb, Heroku as well as the three sites mentioned above were all apparently suffering complications and even complete outages
At 10:31 a.m. PDT, Reddit tweeted that its "site is down right now."
Upon a subsequent TechRadar check at 12:45 p.m. PDT, Reddit appeared to once again be operational, though reports throughout the day have pegged it as down once again.
"Like many other services, we've been taken down by the outage," said Erin Gleason, a spokeswoman for Foursquare, the mobile check-in service, in an interview with the New York Times Bits blog.
"Both the site and the app are inaccessible right now."
Various reports also had the Netflix site experiencing disruption.
Amazon's angst
In a status board message from 11:26 a.m. PDT, EC2 let customers know what was happening.
"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 voumes will experience degraded performance."
The disruption does not appear to be impacting major AWS-based sites such as Netflix and Instagram.
Another outage caused by a severe electrical storm took down those two major players over the summer. The outage took place at the same Virginia data center and brought with it AWS for an entire weekend.
Via The Verge, AllThingsD, AWS Service Health Dashboard, NYT Bits
