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

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:

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.

Related:

• 'Leap Second' and Violent Storms: How the Internet Died Twice This Past Weekend
• Liberal Blog ThingProgress Hit With Malware Message -- And a Web Expert We Contacted Isn't Buying Their Explanation

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