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Comment by michaelfairley | Hacker News Reader

The AWS status page[1] is showing problems for EC2 East as of a few minutes ago. This <strike>might be</strike> is a more widespread issue.

EDIT: Various non-Heroku EC2-East-based sites (e.g. Quora) seem to be down as well, lending more evidence to this being an EC2/EBS outage.

1: http://status.aws.amazon.com/

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Half the startup world is offline right now, yet the AWS status page is all greens with one "info" notice about EBS (which I doubt is the issue here). I'm glad to have moved off a fully AWS stack back to my own servers over a year ago. My uptime, bills, and stress level are all much improved.

Sounds like half of the startup world hasn't spent the time or the money to design their service to be redundant on top of AWS.

Fortunately for most, they dont have customers yet

That made me laugh. Am I a bad person?

The sales pitch is kind of that it's already redundant. You know, RAID and load balancers and all.

That's hardly surprising. The groupthink on cloud services is that they magically make everything scalable, cheap and easy. Making redundant software is hard work.

Definitely an EBS issue. Our (EBS backed, Heroku hosted) DB was returning queries more and more slowly leading up to the outage.

They posted an update on amazon: We continue to investigate this issue. We can confirm that there is both impact to volumes and instances in a single AZ in US-EAST-1 Region. We are also experiencing increased error rates and latencies on the EC2 APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.

Also Amazon Relational Database Service (N. Virginia) is unavailible.

Seems like its snowballing.

RDS actually uses EBS so it is most likely the same underlying issue.

Out of curiosity do we know if http://status.aws.amazon.com/ is hosted on AWS?

It's a key design constraint of status.aws.amazon.com that it not depend on any AWS services. (Or so I've heard.)

status.aws.amazon.com resolves to 207.171.185.167 for me.

That IP isn't in the EC2 IP ranges (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1528), so at the very least it's not hosted on EC2.

I thought I read somewhere that it was on Rackspace

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