Amazon appears to have resolved an outage that affected the company's EC2 operations based in Northern Virginia. The problems reportedly brought down services from a wide range of websites, including Foursquare, Instagram, Netflix, Reddit and Quora, among others. The problems were isolated to the EC2 East-1 location, rather than both of Amazon's EC2 datacenters in the US.
Sony briefly took down the PlayStation Network late Tuesday afternoon in a surprise move. The unannounced shutdown caught users off-guard forcing them to install an additional security fix. Gamers who tried to access their network accounts were greeted with this error message: “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network. (80710016). Please wait." Following the outage, Sony posted a message on its support pages that tells users that to regain access, they will need to install a new firmware update and create a new password.
Sony VP Kaz Hirai, has fronted the world’s media in an attempt to stem the negative publicity the company is facing in the wake of the PSN hacking outage. While shedding little new light on the nature of the attack, Hirai explained that the company has involved the FBI in investigating what it referred to as a “criminal cyber-attack on the company’s data-center located in San Diego.” Hirai also promised that Sony would be bringing its services back online in a “phased restoration” starting this week and it that would also involve the company moving its servers out of San Diego to an undisclosed location.
Verizon's 4G LTE network suffered a nationwide outage late last night, affecting over 500,000 Verizon customers. The service disruption also caused HTC Thunderbolt users to lose access to the Verizon 3G network. A Verizon spokesman tweeted earlier today that their engineers are aware of the problem and working on a solution.
Reports are coming in from MobileMe users who cannot access email. Two MacNN writers said their mail stopped working Monday afternoon. A check of MobileMe webmail revealed a message reading: "Your MobileMe mail is currently unavailable." Apple's MobileMe status page, however, said all MobileMe functions were "operational." Even the special status blog set up amid Mobile Me's rocky launch has not been updated in nearly two weeks. Other users are reporting similar problems.
Apple's MobileMe support is continuing to have outages in its second week of service and some users are reporting serious problems with email delivery and email access. The support page for the email and personal-information cloud service has a status report currently listing one percent of users are without MobilMe Mail, but does not indicate when the service will return for the affected users; other services are listed as available. The page has also announced that scheduled maintenance from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. tonight may result in MobileMe services going offline again.
An EDGE network outage that seems to be based around pre-paid AT&T iPhone GO clients is on its fifth day today, leaving many without mobile internet access. According to Scott Kleinberg of iPhone, Therefore I Blog, users have been experiencing intermittent success surrounded by failure to access the EDGE network. Several have reported switching to the billed service and are back on the network. AT&T has not officially commented on the matter, other than to say they are working on a solution to the problem.
BlackBerry devices on Monday saw a major service outage over the US and Canada, that spread across all service providers. According to Yahoo News, RIM did not comment on the outage, which Yahoo says is predictable behavior, based on a similar incident from April of last year. In the past, RIM has remained quiet on service outages for quite some time, then finally providing a cryptic answer. It is unknown how many users were affected during the outage; some users were able to access their device later that afternoon.
Telecom Italia Mobile is the leading candidate for the Italian iPhone carrier, according to extrapolations based on evidence in the iPhone software package, while a vast EDGE network outage is affecting a significant portion of iPhone users in the US. Italian news site Macity has pointed out that the TIM_Italy.bundle introduced in the v1.1.2 iPhone updater is still there in the current v1.1.3. In firmware v1.1.1, Apple had introduced Italian as an operable language.
