June 30, 2012 - 11:08 AMT
Amazon web services outage takes down Instagram, Pinterest

A sizable outage of Amazon’s various web services caused many major web services to crumble on Friday, June 29 evening. The issues stem from power loss and extend across Amazon’s database, cloud and Elastic Compute services, as indicated by Amazon’s status page, The Next Web reported.

The outages began around 10:45 am EST with outages affecting EC2 instances and EBS volumes, but have certainly gotten worse as the day has gone on. They are currently affecting many services that utilize Amazon’s cloud offerings for various portions of their business. This includes popular cloud service Heroku, which says that it has lost some connectivity to its Virginia architecture.

Consumer facing services like Instagram, Netflix, Pocket and Pinterest have also been experiencing problems. The outage appears to be affecting the US-East-1 zone primarily. This is the second outage to hit that zone this month.

Amazon has later updated its status dashboard stating the power issues in N. Virginia have now been resolved. You should begin seeing some of your favorite services returning to normal.