FollowSeveral top websites on Sunday suffered a blackout or their serves faced slowdown after Amazon’s unit that runs web servers for other companies experienced a software problem.
The short-lived problems come less than a week after Amazon’s North American web stores went offline for over 45 minutes. Earlier, Google and Microsoft Outlook have suffered similar outgage.
The problems were traced to a data centre in northern Virginia that was struggling to keep up with demand.
Picture site Instagram, Twitter’s Vine video-sharing application and Netflix were among the popular sites that witnessed a slowdown or remained unavailable for the users on the weekend.
Instagram was the first to acknowledge that access to its services was intermittent via Twitter and other services put out warning messages soon after. It sent a tweet saying it was aware some users were having trouble loading Instagram and that it was working to resolve the problem. Vine later sent a similar tweet.
Another site facing trouble, AirBnB, tweeted that it was one of several websites and apps that were temporarily down because Amazon server problems.
The problems for Americans began about 16:00 Eastern time (21:00 GMT) and continued for several hours. During this time access to the web services was completely troublesome for the visitors.
On the status page for its web services, Amazon said it was investigating a series of problems at the Virginia data centre. The problems hit databases, software that spreads queries across servers as well as the code controlling the core computers underlying the whole service.
After the problems were resolved, Amazon said the glitch was caused by the “partial failure of a networking device” but added no further details.
Amazon Web Services provides companies with online storage and computing power. Its website reported several problems resolved on Sunday evening, with only minor issues remaining.
