Hardware failure at an Amazon data centre knocked a host of high profile web services that rely on Amazon’s cloud-cased network out of action.
The affected sites and services included Instagram, Netflix, Vine, Airbnb and several other services.
Instagram was one of the first to identify the glitch that access to its service was intermittent via Twitter, followed by other warning messages from the other services within a few minutes.
The problem has been traced to a data centre in Virginia, where glitch affected databases and made them unable to launch server queries.
Amazon issued a statement saying the problems were caused by a partial failure of a networking device.
Instagram was the first to acknowledge that access to its services was intermittent via Twitter and other services put out warning messages soon after.
The problems come after Amazon’s North American web stores went offline for about 30 minutes earlier this month.
Google also experienced five minutes of downtime on 16 August that caused web activity to drop by 40 per cent for the duration of the outage.
