Amazon web services outage causes Netflix, Instagram, Heroku and more to grind to a halt [Updated: Returning to normal]

A sizable outage of Amazon’s various web services caused many major web services to crumble on Friday evening. The issues stem from power loss and extend across Amazon’s database, cloud and Elastic Compute services, as indicated by Amazon’s status page.

The outages began around 10:45 am EST with outages affecting EC2 instances and EBS volumes, but have certainly gotten worse as the day has gone on. They are currently affecting many services that utilize Amazon’s cloud offerings for various portions of their business. This includes popular cloud service Heroku, which says that it has lost some connectivity to its Virginia architecture.

We’re currently experiencing technical difficulties and we’re working to correct the issues. Thanks for your patience

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Consumer facing services like Instagram, Netflix, Pocket and Pinterest have also been experiencing problems. The outage appears to be affecting the US-East-1 zone primarily. This is the second outage to hit that zone this month.

The outages are very likely due to a series of violent thunderstorms to hit the northeastern region in the last 24 hours. And you know if Amazon is affected, many more smaller data centers will be as well, so here’s to those folks working long hours this evening. So, if you’re using your favorite service or app this evening and it’s not working properly, you know who to blame, mother nature.

We will monitor the situation and keep you posted as to the status of Amazon’s services.

Update 23:44 PST: Amazon has updated its status dashboard stating the power issues in N. Virginia have now been resolved. You should begin seeing some of your favorite services returning to normal.

Image Credit: Intel Free Press