Amazon cloud outage affects Facebook, Twitter



Amazon.com's Web services division suffered an outage Sunday that took down prominent websites and apps including Facebook's Instagram and Twitter's Vine video service, The Wall Street Journal reported. The glitch, which prevented many users from accessing those and other sites, appeared to be fixed within a couple of hours.

Amazon blamed the problem on issues with Elastic Block Store storage service. The company advertises that its outsourced Web services are more reliable than companies running their own computer servers, WSJ reported.

Amazon.com's website went out last Monday for about 40 minutes, possibly costing the company an estimated $4.72 million in lost sales, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Read more about Amazon's cloud service outage here.