James Delahunty
28 Aug 2013 4:22
A glitch affecting an Amazon servers at a data center affected Instagram, Vine, Netflix and others over the weekend.
The problems hit users of the services on Sunday, with Instagram the first to acknowledge on Twitter that access to its services appeared to be intermittent. It was followed by the other affected web services.
The problem was traced to a data center in Northern Virginia that ran into problems keeping up with demand. This affected servers that are part of Amazon's cloud-based network. Users of amazon's services, including Instagram and Netflix, experienced technical problems as a result.
The problem has since been resolved, with Amazon blaming it on the "partial failure of a networking device" but not elaborating any further.
Problems affecting cloud services tend to get more attention than traditional outages because of the far-reaching consequences they can have.