Technolog - Amazon servers take down Reddit, Foursquare, and more

Amazon servers take down Reddit, Foursquare, and more

By Rosa Golijan

Popular link-sharing site Reddit is down, location-based social network Foursquare is down, URL shortener ow.ly is down, application hosting service Cydia is down — every few clicks and we discover a site that's down. What is going on?

It turns out that Amazon's servers are to blame.

The Atlantic Wire reports that Amazon's EC2 Web-hosting service — something on which many popular sites and services rely — suffered some sort of technical problem which took some of our favorite Internet destinations off the map:

While most people think of Amazon as the world's biggest online retailer it's also the world's biggest cloud-computing provider. So when its servers went down, it took Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and Hootsuite down with it.

The reason so many sites choose Amazon is because its hosting fees are some of the cheapest around. Many, if not most, companies rely on third parties to run their servers. But the proliferation of companies relying on Amazon's hosting service shows how a hiccup can turn into a storm. 

Based on a continually updated list being maintained by Arik Hesseldahl of All Things D, the following sites and services have experienced or are still experiencing issues as a result of the Amazon server situation:

• Foursquare
• Quora
• Reddit
• Hootsuite
• ow.ly
• SCVNGR
• Discovr
• Wildfire
• Livefyre
• CampgroundManager
• Totango
• ESchedule
• ZeHosting
• Recorded Future
• PercentMobile
• The Cydia Store

We've reached out to Amazon for a statement regarding what exactly happened and will update once we know more about the situation, but in the meantime will trust a status message which states that the Web-hosting provider is "continuing to work on resolving this issue."

via technolog.msnbc.msn.com