Amazon server failure affects many sites

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Major websites including Foursquare and Reddit crashed or suffered slowdowns Thursday after technical problems rattled Amazon.com’s widely used Web servers, frustrating millions of people who couldn’t access their favorite sites.

Though better known for selling books, DVDs and other consumer goods, Amazon also rents out space on huge computer servers that run many websites and other online services.

The problems began at an Amazon data center near Dulles Airport outside Washington and persisted into the afternoon. The failures were widespread, but they varied in severity.

HootSuite, which lets users monitor Twitter and other social networks more easily, was down completely, as was questions-and-answers site Quora.

The location-sharing social network Foursquare experienced glitches, and the news-sharing site Reddit was in “emergency read-only mode.”

Many other companies that use Amazon Web Services, such as Netflix Inc. and Zynga Inc., which runs Facebook games, appeared to be unscathed. Amazon has at least one other major data center that stayed up, in California.

It’s not uncommon for Internet services to become inaccessible due to technical problems, sometimes for hours or even days. But Thursday’s outages were notable because Amazon’s servers are so commonly used, meaning many sites went down at once.

Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.