Amazon failure takes down sites across Internet

NEW YORK — Scores of websites and Internet services like Foursquare and Reddit are down or have limited availability because of problems at a data center run by Amazon.com.

The problems reveal widespread reliance on Amazon Web Services, which rents out computers and data storage on a self-service basis over the Internet.

AWS is generally considered reliable because it uses vast numbers of computers, spread out in different data centers, making Thursday’s failure unusual.

Amazon says the trouble started early in the morning at a data center in Northern Virginia.

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