- Lessons Learned, Survival-Stories etc. von Firmen mit Amazon-Infrastruktur Before 5 AM Eastern on April 21st, 2011, an outage started at EC2's northern Virginia datacenter that brought down hundreds of web 2.0 and social media websites including Foursquare, Springpad, Reddit, Quora, BigDoor and Hootsuite. Specifically, attempts to use Amazon's elastic-disk and database services hung, failed, or were slow. Service was restored to some parts of the datacenter (three of four "availability zones" in Amazon's terms) by late afternoon Eastern time that day