Amazon servers take down Reddit, Foursquare, and more

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:

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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. 

For Subscribers

FOR SUBSCRIBERSAbdul El-Sayed tries to woo MAHA voters as Democrats seek inroads with RFK’s supporters

FOR SUBSCRIBERSKratom-like substances are popping up in a typically benign supplement

FOR SUBSCRIBERSGOP super PAC increases its spending for Sen. Jon Husted in tough Ohio race

FOR SUBSCRIBERSRecords reveal tumultuous marriage between slain New York Times executive and wife

FOR SUBSCRIBERSFrom clean energy warrior to ‘wall of shame,’ James Talarico reverses on a fossil fuel money pledge

FOR SUBSCRIBERSCongressional staff planned official trip with luxury stops in Italy and France weeks before election

FOR SUBSCRIBERSA harrowing ordeal aboard an Israel-bound plane

FOR SUBSCRIBERSOpenAI CEO Sam Altman to skip congressional hearing on rogue AI agents

FOR SUBSCRIBERSKey DOJ lawyers departed Trump ‘grand conspiracy’ probe amid pressure to produce, source says

FOR SUBSCRIBERSTrump’s new AI chatbot often links to a site launched under Clinton 26 years ago

FOR SUBSCRIBERSAt MAHA summit, industry CEOs the movement once vilified take the stage

FOR SUBSCRIBERSThis Paralympian has two goals: Win medals and give away $500,000 to her teammates

FOR SUBSCRIBERSCornell rape allegation spotlights stringent New York state laws that have long drawn criticism

FOR SUBSCRIBERSThe debate over AI’s future rages on both coasts

FOR SUBSCRIBERSDecades-old march dispute reignites in Northern Ireland, threatening political crisis

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."

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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter, loves to be liked on Facebook, and doesn't know how she'll get through the day without a fix of Reddit links.