Another Amazon cloud outage brings major websites down

Amazon suffered another embarrassment as web services hosted at its Virginia datacentre were subject to an outage, bringing websites of a number of high-profile customers down, and for not the first time.

The cloud infrastructure was hit by an outage in July, with a thunderstorm blamed as the culprit, but there was no extreme weather to speak of in this instance.

Amazon has not given specific reasons for the downtime, which affected websites including Reddit, Foursquare, Pinterest and Minecraft among others, only acknowledging that there was "degraded performance".

"We can confirm degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances using affected EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance," Amazon said in one of many live updates as the web services provider looked to solve the problem.

However, the company denied a cyber attack was the reason for the outage, after a member of Anonymous claimed responsibility for the issues in a Tweet. Amazon web services are now reported to be working normally.

Still, whatever caused the outage, it isn't good news for Amazon as the cloud provider lost customers following similar failures within the space of a month earlier this year.

The company is also facing claims of closing customers' accounts and wiping their Kindle e-books. All in all, it hasn't been a good 24 hours for Amazon.