MAJOR WEBSITES including answer service Quora, news service Reddit, social network manager HootSuite, and location tracker Foursquare have been affected by service failures at Amazon’s cloud computing centre in north Virginia, on which they rely to provide their service.

Quora was unreachable in Ireland yesterday morning and afternoon.

The site is entirely hosted on Amazon’s EC2 (elastic cloud computing) service, as are Foursquare and a number of other services.

Hootsuite’s response was slow, while Reddit’s search service was out of action, announcing: “Amazon is currently experiencing a degradation. They are working on it.”

Amazon’s cloud computing status page showed problems at the north Virginia centre, which provides services for a number of “Web 2.0” companies.

The disruption started at about 9.40am Irish time and continued throughout yesterday

“Despite the continued effort from the team to resolve the issue, we have not made any meaningful progress for the affected database instances since the last update,” Amazon said in a statement on its Amazon web services website yesterday.

Many web-based companies, especially start-ups, use cloud computing services from companies including Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

They are charged only for the computing power that is used, rather than having to make expensive capital investments in servers which could be rendered undersized in a few months by the rapid growth that they often aim to achieve.

Amazon has not given any specific time by which the problem will be rectified.

The north Virginia site is one of many cloud computing centres run by Amazon, but such systems are usually designed so that service failure in one centre does not disrupt others – nor the clients using the service.

Amazon has not explained why the load from the north Virginia facility had not been routed around and the load redistributed to one of its many other centres while the problem is being dealt with. – ( Guardianservice)