Amazon failure takes down sites across Internet

HootSuite, which lets users monitor Twitter and other social networks more easily, was down completely, as was questions-and-answers site Quora.

The location-sharing social network Foursquare experienced glitches, during the news-sharing site Reddit was in "emergency read-only mode."

It's not uncommon for Internet services to become inaccessible due to technical problems, at times for hours or even days. However Thursday's outages were notable because Amazon's servers are so commonly used, meaning many sites went down then and there.

The computing power

Amazon Web Services provide "cloud" or utility-style computing in which clients pay only for the computing power and storage they need, on remote computers.

Seattle-based Amazon has big plans for AWS. Though it now makes up just a few percent of the company's revenue, CEO Jeff Bezos said last year that it could in the end be as large as Amazon's retail business. Competitors include Rackspace Hosting Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s Azure platform.

Some people consider cloud computing more reliable than conventional hosting services in which a small company might rent a handful of computers in a data center.

Lydia Leong, an analyst for the tech innovation firm Gartner, said that judging by details posted on Amazon's AWS status page, a network connection failed Thursday morning, triggering an automatic recovery mechanism that at the time also failed.

The applications more widely over Amazon's network

That might include spreading the applications more widely over Amazon's network, so that problems at one data center won't bring down everything, he said.