Amazon EC2 Hosting Service Outage Knocks Big Name Mobile Apps Offline

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com spin-off company built for software developers, suffered a major outage over the weekend. The outage temporarily knocked a significant number of web sites and mobile apps offline. Popular apps like Instagram and Vine were down for several hours as Amazon’s cloud computing services that they rely on were reported suffering “a ‘grey’ partial failure with a networking device” that resulted in packet loss.

According to news source PCMag, “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 balances” via Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), also in Northern Virginia.”

As an iPhone app developer in Las Vegas, much of our mobile app infrastructure depends on hosting services provided by AWS. The network outage knocked some of Dogtown Media’s properties offline on Sunday, although service had returned to normal this morning. Many of Amazon’s technology tools are the lifeblood of the iPhone app developer community. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. The developer friendly service is designed to make scaling an application for growth demands quick and easy.