Amazon suffers yet another cloud crash

Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service faced another crash last night, which took down major websites like Instagram and Foursquare.

But unlike the company’s disastrous cloud crash in April, which lasted around 10 days, this time Amazon’s Web Services was back up and running without issue in about an hour. Amazon’s April crash already made many wary of relying too much on cloud services, and the company needs to make sure it avoids losing more trust from its business customers and consumers.

We’ve asked Amazon for further comment on the crash and will update when we hear back. Other affected sites include Netflix’s streaming service, Reddit, Quora, and Turntable.fm, among many others.

According to TechCrunch, the outage only affected the EAST-1 portion of Amazon’s EC2 facility in North Virginia. That’s also where the April outage occurred, so it seems Amazon may have to deal with some ongoing issues from the previous attack.

While it was a short outage, it didn’t stop users on Twitter from noticing and loudly complaining about losing access to their favorite sites. It’s clear that many major services rely on Amazon’s cloud servers, and even minor disruptions could have a widespread impact.

Here are the updates surrounding the outage from Amazon’s EC2 status site:

-7:39 PM PDT We are investigating connectivity issues for EC2 in the US-EAST-1 region.
-7:50 PM PDT We can verify connectivity issues between instances in the US-EAST-1 region and the Internet.
-8:03 PM PDT Full connectivity has been restored. The service is operating normally.