Reddit, Pinterest Among Sites Taken Down Monday By Amazon Failure

Reddit and Pinterest were among many sites down for large portions of Monday afternoon, the result of degraded service in Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS).

Amazon Web Services confirmed the website failures on its status page at 2:11 p.m. EDT on Monday, noting that it was experiencing “degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes.” The issue was restricted to a zone in the eastern region of the United States, Network World reported.

By mid-afternoon, the popular link-sharing site Reddit had an error message up noting that “Reddit is down.” Also unavailable for millions of internet users was the photo-sharing site IMGUR, vacation rental service AirBNB, and payment service Payvment.

As Network World noted, the error that took Reddit and Pinterest down on Monday had occurred before:

AWS EBS is a cloud-based block storage service that allows users to store large amounts of data; it’s typically used in conjunction with AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services. AWS breaks each of its data centers up into multiple Availability Zones and recommends that customers run their workloads across multiple zones to prevent downtime.

AWS has periodic performance issues this year, including its last major outage in late June, which it blamed on powerful storms that ripped through the mid-Atlantic region causing power outages. Last year, AWS was down for as many as four days for some customers, including Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and HootSuite.

AWS later noted that other aspects of its services delivery had been impacted by the outage. The massive computing footprint of AWS generates 1 percent of all internet traffic, with nearly one-third of all internet users accessing sites that use AWS daily, Network World noted.

Reports from Twitter indicated sites including Pinterest, GitHub, and Gamespot, also saw disrupted service in addition to Reddit and Pinterest going down.