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If You Couldn’t Access Popular Websites Like Reddit Today, Here’s Why

Oct. 22, 2012 3:55pm Liz Klimas

Late last week, YouTube went down for a short period of time and users took to Twitter to express their sentiments — however joking they were — that the sky was falling. On Monday, a slew of other popular websites experienced problems due to a cloud hosting issue.

These sites included Reddit, GitHub, Heroku, Imgur, Turntable, Airbnb and MongoLab, according to Beta Beat. Even TheBlaze couldn’t host its daily BlazeCast, which runs through a live-streaming website calls Spreecast, apparently due to the problems. Beta Beat reported Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud having the status “degraded DBS performance in a single Availability Zone,” alluding that this system might be the source of the outage.

Here are a few tweets regarding the outage:

Reddit Crash? Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud Experiences Degraded Serves Resulting in Website Outages

As Tech Crunch pointed out, this isn’t the first time Amazon’s EC2 has experienced issues:

The last time something like this happened was in July, when a significant electrical storm took out backup power at the same location and knocked AWS offline for a weekend. In that outage, sites like Instagram, Pinterest and Netflix all crashed.

At the time of this posting, Amazon’s status, which earlier read degraded performance, says service should be operating normally now. Some sites appear to be functioning normally again while others still appear unavailable.

Stay tuned: If more information to this developing story becomes available, we’ll update this post.

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Comments (30)

thesnitch
Posted on October 23, 2012 at 9:25am
This site is Very Liberal, and has been known to SKEW polls as practical jokes. and more. But in the mess, they have Very great information, and also are very good at fact checking with links. I go there alot for latest news humor and Videos. when it went down, i was hitting F5 150 per second. I was screaming!!! WHY WHY U NO WORK REDDIT!!! YOU WORK NOW!!!!

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The0bserver
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 9:41pm
Is it a DBS or a DNS? DBS in my experience is a DataBase Server, while DNS is a Domain Name Server, two totally different animals. Based on the other info, it sounds like it is a DNS. They probably had to reset it or replace it, unless it was a bad cable on the backbone. If the DNS crashed, domain names, like http://www.theblaze.com, don’t get resolved into an IP Address. Therefore, no one can access any sites, unless they use only IP Addresses..

From a security standpoint, I don’t get why anyone would put their corporate data, or any private data in a cloud. Don’t you want to know who has access to your data? Must have been an upper management decision, read, non-techie, who made that decision, made without contacting anyone on the front lines, like they always do. You know, the apple polisher says, ‘Say boss, we can get rid of a bunch of IT guys and save a bunch of money if we dump our data on some servers run by a 3rd party. Of course, we’ve lost control on who stores our data, who owns it, and who can view it and copy it. But hey, we save a bunch of dough up front, and I look good (until it compromised).’

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- The0bserver
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 10:22pm
  The managers who make these decisions should get some kind of Darwin Award.
  
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P8riot
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:49pm
wasn’t there an article here recently about “Reddit” and it’s kiddie porn poster who was revealed? If so, I hope it was infected with a super-nasty virus that went to its users.

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- antitheist
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 6:29pm
  So does that mean the the blaze should be shut down since it’s linking to a site with “child porn”?
  Wouldn’t that count as distributing child porn?
  
  Report this comment
asybot12
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:47pm
Today’s little hiccup on our sun ( a minor M-5 class flare not even pointed directly at us) @ around 18.55 UTC ( 2.55 ET ) caused this .
I hope all of you realize what our sun does to any cloud. (it tends to evaporate it).
Predictions for larger flares later this week!

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- Gourdy
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:52pm
  Indeed. I take some odd comfort in the fact that nature could care less about us humans and our small concerns!
  
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Minnaloushe
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:37pm
AT&T’s DNS went flaky a few weeks ago and rendered a lot of businesses’ sites unreachable. Then they had a mojor outage not long after that.

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KickinBack
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:33pm
That’s what you get for using windmills to power your servers.

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- kahieb
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 6:47pm
  Either that or they use flaky Solyndra solar panels…
  
  Report this comment
SimpleTruths
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:23pm
Maybe it’s part of Obama’s test for declaring martial law! Maybe it’s the End Times! Maybe Agenda 21 is kicking in!

So many boogie men, so little time.

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The-Monk
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:23pm
It’s just Obama playing with his Internet kill switch….

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- CatB
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 5:08pm
  Most likely :-) he has to have a plan two .. since Romney is surging … lock and load.
  
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Anonymous T. Irrelevant
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:18pm
Sorry, don’t go to perv sites like reddit. I have never heard of those other sites. Already dropped Amazon and only watch YouTube when viewing a video here.

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- EtchASketch
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:38pm
  How’s your bunker coming along, foil boy?
  
  Report this comment
- Mr.buff1959
  Posted on October 23, 2012 at 2:01am
  If need be you can stay with me somewhere on Little River in Texas..
  
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OniKaze
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:12pm
Reddit Crashed….. Ohh no… all the mis-informed dorks I know that use Reddit (which are the only type of people I know that use reddit) will have to get their Pre-spun news elsewhere…

I guess the liars that troll Reddit in order to push their “News” on others will have to take their lies elsewhere…

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4xeverything
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:10pm
China…need I say more?

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Bronco II
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:06pm
There is alot of stuff going on I’m having trouble posting things to my profile page on FB and a few minutes ago I just got an error messege from Microsoft they couldn’t open facebook so I closed the tab and re-opened it.I have been having on occasion copy and paste some of the Blaze stories because when I use the FB share button the screen shows a blue messege window saying the internet connection is can’t open the site so something is going on but it’s been happening for a few days now.

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- marcus_arealius
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:36pm
  Your amazing skill at technical writing qualifies you for a job in a call center, in Iran. Get your resume’ and plane tickets ready, you’re off to a better life! However, if that doesn’t work out for you, I’m sure you have a spot at some San Fagsicko Dot-Comm Alternative Lifestyle Communnal Match-up Site in tech support.. So many opportunties.
  
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randy
Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:02pm
Anyone storing anything on a cloud has to be an idiot……
Just for the privacy aspect alone.

Disclaimer…….. Just my opinion.

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- OniKaze
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:13pm
  NOT just YOUR opinion….. I second that statement…
  
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- Gourdy
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:17pm
  Everything you’ve written on The Blaze, in every email you’ve sent, and any financial transaction you’ve made online is stored in “the cloud.” The cloud is just a fancy term for servers.
  
  Report this comment
- dgPehrson
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:18pm
  Just your opinion? I have to disagree with that statement. As complicated as it may or could have sounded (even insulting) has to be true. I’ll be truthful about it…
  
  You’re an idiot if you store your personal information on the “cloud”. I’m looking at you iPhone.
  
  Report this comment
- SimpleTruths
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:25pm
  Every thought you have ever thought is stored on the cloud, unless of course you’re wearing the proper headgear.
  
  Report this comment
- marcus_arealius
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:40pm
  The ‘Cloud’ is just another term for ‘Scamming the Dumb Public Out of their money’. In fact ‘Cloud’ is an apropos term, ‘Vaporware’, more like ‘Vaporproduct’. Just where I want my company’s Intellectual Property, scattered all over the planet on servers in somebody’s basement, down where Harry Reid has his way with small animals and a 55gal drum of KY. But I digress.
  
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- Anonymous T. Irrelevant
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 4:42pm
  DGPEHRSON
  An iPhone can be backed up to iTunes on a local computer, so it’s not really a cloud-based device.
  I also agree that clouds are just a fancy word for servers. i always thought it was stupid to call them clouds, but they kept pushing the name.
  
  Report this comment
- Psychosis
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 5:10pm
  how right you are
  
  you lose any control over your own information …………miss your rent payment ………..poof no longer yours
  
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- The0bserver
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 9:57pm
  I agree, Randy. It’s a stupid corporate decision, based entirely on money. “Say boss, we can save a ton of money by getting rid of our server admins and server farms by dumping our data onto unknown servers around the world, under the control of unknown countries and people. Ain’t I smart? Why no, I didn’t query IT, but they’ll just give us a bunch of jargon which we won’t understand, so I say let’s forge ahead and save money up front.” I hope no hospitals are doing this with patient data, or banks too, for that matter.
  
  And Gourdy, yes they are “just” servers. However, the rub is you have no idea where your data physically resides, who has access to your confidental data, who can copy it, or if it is stolen. You have no idea what security, if any, they have on their server farms or if it is current and up to date, since it’s “in the cloud.” In some cases, it is unclear who actually owns ‘your’ data, that little tidbit being buried in the small print.
  
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- The0bserver
  Posted on October 22, 2012 at 10:14pm
  “Anonymous T. Irrelevant,” they are called clouds because that was the networking diagram symbol used long before the idea of cloud servers was developed to indicate those parts of the network where you are too concerned about the physical details, perhaps because it is controlled by people (companies, entities) out of your control, outside of your company, and you have some confidence that the data will arrive at its destination, and the details on how it gets there aren’t too important. The cloud symbol predates the modern concept of cloud servers by several decades.
  
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