Amazon Server Failure Takes Down Major Sites

Hootsuite, we have a problem.

Amazon’s EC2 Web-hosting service, the world’s biggest cloud-computing provider, is experiencing technical difficulties and it’s taken down some of the web’s most popular sites.

Reddit, Quora, Hootsuite, Foursquare and URL shortener ow.ly, among several others, have been down this morning because of a hiccup in Amazon’s hosting service.

The outage has caused quite a bit of a hassle. Hootsuite’s homepage currently displays a tongue-in-cheek message that provides a reasonable solution to frustrated users: “Owls need a break sometimes too. We'll be back in action shortly -- in the meantime go outside and flap your arms around, you may find that flying ain't very easy. In the meantime, if you can't wait to send a Tweet, head over to Twitter web to share your 140 character musings.”

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EC2’s variable pricing model has been a big draw to startups as its web hosting, processing power and storage capabilities allow firms to scale as they grow without investing in their own data centers, but the mass quantity of sites on a single unsteady host has shaken up the world wide web.

There’s no telling how long it will take until all of Amazon EC2’s sites are back up, but Amazon assures it is working on the issue and some sites, including Foursquare, are back up and running so at least you can check in to Starbucks now.