Quora, Reddit and HootSuite taken down after Amazon EC2 outage

The perils of cloud computing were highlighted again on Thursday after an outage at an Amazon Web Services datacentre disrupted firms relying on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, including Reddit, Quora and Hootsuite .

According to the AWS Service Health Dashboard, the problems began at around 9.40am BST.

"We are currently investigating latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region," the update read.

The problems appear to have continued all day, and Quora and HootsSuite were still down at the time of writing.

Reddit was back up, but the search functionality on the site seems to have been affected by the outage, and users are presented with the following message: "Amazon is currently experiencing a degradation. We are still waiting on them to get to our volumes. Sorry."

Amazon's latest update came at around 3.40pm BST. "In addition to the EBS volume latencies, EBS-backed instances in the US-EAST-1 region are failing at a high rate," it read. "This is due to a high error rate for creating new volumes in this region."

A prolonged outage of Amazon's Elastic Block Storage in March forced several firms to reconsider their options and move their infrastructure onto other platforms.