NEW YORK — Major websites, including Foursquare and Reddit, crashed or suffered slowdowns Thursday after technical problems rattled ‘s widely used Web servers, frustrating millions of people who couldn’t access their favorite sites.
Though better known for selling books, DVDs and other consumer goods, Amazon also rents out space on huge computer servers that run many websites and other online services.
The problems began at an Amazon data center near Dulles airport outside Washington and persisted into the afternoon. The failures were widespread, but they varied in severity.
HootSuite, which lets users monitor Twitter and other social networks more easily, was down completely, as was questions-and-answers site Quora.
The location-sharing social network Foursquare experienced glitches, while the news-sharing site Reddit was in “emergency read-only mode.” Many other companies that use Amazon Web Services, such as Netflix and Zynga, which runs Facebook games, appeared to be unscathed. Amazon has at least one other major data center that stayed up, in California.
Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.
