Amazon web services outage hits Instagram, Vine

Chloe AlbanesiusAmazon Web Services had some difficulty over the weekend, which trickled down to affect popular apps like Instagram and Vine.On Sunday afternoon, Amazon’s status dashboard reported “degraded performance” for its EC2 Web service in Northern Virginia, as well as “connectivity issues for load balancers” via Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), also in Northern Virginia.
The problems lasted about an hour. By 3:30 p.m. PT, Amazon reported that the problems were caused by “a ‘grey’ partial failure with a networking device” that resulted in packet loss. “The networking device was removed from service and we are performing a forensic investigation to understand how it failed,” Amazon said. Normal service was restored by about 6 p.m. PT.
Still, the downtime affected some popular apps, including Instagram. With users out enjoying the last days of summer, many found they were unable to offer filtered snaps of beach outings, afternoon drinks, or – of course – what they were eating.
“We know many of you are having trouble loading Instagram. We identified the issue and are working to fix it ASAP. Thanks for holding on,” Instagram tweeted yesterday.
Those looking to make videos couldn’t just switch to Vine, though. The Twitter-owned app was also experiencing problems. “We’re aware of some issues affecting our servers and are working to address them now. Thanks for your patience and hang tight!” Vine said in its own tweet.
By Monday morning, it appeared that both apps were back online. – Google News