Amazon Web Services suffered a power outage in its Northern Virginia data centre on Thursday evening, an event that disrupted service at several start-ups and Internet companies.

The Amazon Web Services Service Health Dashboard indicates that problems were first detected just before 9 p.m. PT on June 14. Affected services included Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Relational Database Service, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk served out of Amazon's U.S. East region. "We can confirm a portion of a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region lost power," Amazon said in a dashboard status report. "We are actively restoring power to the effected EC2 instances and EBS volumes. We are continuing to see increased API errors. Customers might see increased errors trying to launch new instances in the Region."

Source: Information Week