Cloud outages result in Amazon apology

A large scale outage of Amazon's cloud hosting service caused issues with several high-traffic websites and garnered an apology and explanation from the retail giant.

Well-known websites Foursquare, Reddit and Quora were forced to scale back or go offline due to the problems with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.

The BBC reports "there was a problem when changing a network configuration, which caused its primary and secondary systems to fail and overload.

"Amazon then had to stop the system and restart it, including physically moving servers.”

Amazon provided a lengthy and detailed technical explanation along with the apology.