Amazon down again as problems plague Instragram, Netflix and Vine

'Partial failure of networking device' blamed by company in second outage in a week

A glitch at an Amazon data centre caused users of Instagram, Netflix, Vine and Airbnb to suffer intermittent service levels yesterday.

Amazon's cloud network was affected for around an hour by what the company called a "partial failure of a networking device", which began at 1pm Pacific Time, and soon led to what Amazon Web Services' [AWS] status page called "degraded experience" for its service user base.

The problem was traced back to a data centre in Virginia, with the glitch apparently affecting databases, and making them unable to launch server queries.

While the problems at Amazon lasted only an hour, services at Amazon's cloud customers are said to have been affected for several hours afterwards.

It is the second time within a week that Amazon has experienced such problems, with AWS glitching and causing the company's own US shopping site to go down on 19 August for around half an hour.

Meanwhile, Google experienced five minutes of downtime on 16 August that caused web activity to drop by 40 per cent for the duration of the outage.

It has been estimated that the outage could have cost AWS customers as much as $1,100 in sales per second, while Google's five-minute downtime has been estimated to have cost more than $545,000 per second.