A failure at one of Amazon.com's data hosting centers caused dozens of popular websites — including Foursquare and Reddit — to crash on Thursday.
The Seattle-based company said it had pinpointed the problem to a data center in northern Virginia early Thursday, but sites that rely on its services are continuing to experience outages.
It was the biggest outage caused by the usually pretty reliable cloud-hosting and personalized data storage — Amazon Web Services — in memory.
"Our usually-amazing data center hosts, Amazon EC2, are having a few hiccups this morning, which affected us and a bunch of other services that use them," a note on Foursquare's homepage reads. "Everything looks to be getting back to normal now. We’ll update this when we have the all clear. Thanks for your patience."
Other sites experiencing issues include social media "dashboard" HootSuite and Quora, the user-generated Q+A portal.
