All those people who were looking forward to spending the day checking other people’s updates on Instagram or Vine might have had a really troublesome experience today. This was most probably because both the services were taken down for about an hour due to some issues with the AWS i.e. Amazon Web Services.
It was Instagram which took the initiative to acknowledge its troubles on Twitter and about half an hour later, Vine sailed along as well.
At around 4 PM the Eastern time, there was an inundation of tweets regarding the endless hiccups being faced by the service’s users. The number of complaints just multiplied in no time, once people noticed that they were not able to share their pleasantries like they always do on these social networking websites. Further investigation around Twitter and other sites confirmed that some reliable services like IFTTT, Airbnb, Netflix and Heroku, all relying on AWS were facing similar problems today. Currently, both Vine as well as Instagram are picking up pace and coming back to life while IFTTT’s official website is still out of commission.
Also, a very significant tweet from Airbnb confirmed that there has been problems with AWS’s north Virginia data centre and this was the reason for all this commotion. Thankfully, the company has been doing its bit by reporting the issues to the EC2, load balancing services as well as the relational databases. Also, some of the company’s recent updates have indicated that they have managed to clear the root issue and at present, are cleaning up the whole mess.
Well, we hope that the worst is finally over and soon you can go back to doing your usual stuff on these sites.