A service outage for Amazon’s Web Service (AWS) affected websites like Reddit, Flipboard, FastCompany, Heroku, Airbnb, Imgur, Pinterest and others late last night. It also seems that the outage affected some of Amazon’s storage units on the US East coast, and thus these websites which are hosted by AWS went down.
According to TechCrunch, the outage started as a small issue affecting some instances of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) in North Virginia became a full-blown outage of AWS in North Virginia.
A member of the hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the outage on Twitter. You can see that tweet below:
I’m attacking amazon for about 4 horus but just posted now i had to have sure it was all down
— Anonymous Own3r (@AnonymousOwn3r) अक्टूबर 22, 2012
But CNET reports that Amazon has denied that this was a hacking attack but did not give any further details. CNET was asked to refer to the Amazon Web Services status dashboard.
Screengrab of Amazon’s Web Service dashboard status.
It seems that services are now back for now. Reddit tweeted this out nearly 5 hours back, stating that the site was back.
site is having some problems and down for some. we’re working on it
— reddit status (@redditstatus) अक्टूबर 22, 2012
Here are more tweets from Pinterest, Foursquare, Imgur and Flipboard on the outage
The site issues we were experiencing should be resolved and you can pin to your hearts content again. Thanks again for your understanding!
— Pinterest (@Pinterest) अक्टूबर 22, 2012
You may have noticed that some of your favorite sites are down, including Foursquare. We’re hoping things will be back to normal soon!
— foursquare support (@4sqSupport) अक्टूबर 22, 2012
Imgur was down due to an error with Amazon Web Services, but should be back up for most users at this time.
— imgur (@imgur) अक्टूबर 22, 2012
Service has been restored to normal. Thank you for your patience.
— Flipboard (@Flipboard) अक्टूबर 23, 2012
