Online retailer Amazon’s data center in North Virginia, USA, crashed on the afternoon of 22 October 2012, taking with it a number of websites, including e-card company Someecards and mobile apps such as such as Flipboard and Foursquare.
Amazon confirmed on its Service Update page that a "small number" of volumes in the Elastic Block Service (EBS) were experiencing issues, but did not elaborate on what may have caused the problems.
It took around 12 hours for services to be fully restored, Amazon confirmed.
Several posters on Twitter complained that they were not getting access to websites including Foursquare, turntable.fm and Flipboard.
In June 2012, problems at the same Virginia data center were caused by an electrical storm which took down sites including Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram. In April last year, a major outage at Amazon’s servers affected the services of numerous online companies that used EC2.
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