Reddit, Flipboard, Minecraft down as Amazon Web Services fail

It’s not a good day to have your site hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Major sites including Reddit, FastCompany, Minecraft and Flipboard have gone down due to a fault in the hosting platform.

The site is down right now.It appears to be a network-related issue. We are investigating.

— reddit status (@redditstatus) October 22, 2012

Looking into a site outage now. Looks like status.aws.amazon.com has a performance alert. @fastcompany @fastcoexist

— mankins (@mankins) October 22, 2012

According to The Next Web, Amazon is fighting off a “degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone”.

A similar, but far more wide-reaching failure back in June saw Netflix and Instagram go down to.

Since the outage started, Amazon has issued two updates:

11:26 AM PDT 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.

11:03 AM PDT We are currently experiencing connectivity issues and degraded performance for a small number of RDS DB Instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.

11:06 AM PDT We are currently experiencing elevated API failures and delays launching, updating and deleting Elastic Beanstalk environments in the US-East-1 Region.