The Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 North Virginia cloud went down for approximately four hours yesterday, due to ‘elevated packet loss’.

The issue was first reported on the AWS Service Health Dashboard at 0208 PDT (0908 GMT) on October 15, with the dashboard cautiously noting “possible network connectivity issues” for EC2.

‘Possible’ became confirmed at 0219 PDT (0919 GMT), with a further update at 0320 PDT (1020 GMT) adding that it was due to elevated packet loss.

Only at 0514 PDT (1214 GMT) did Amazon confirm the problem had been fixed, adding that some APIs (application programming interfaces) had experienced increased error rates and latencies.

Some of the AWS customers affected included iSharingSoft, who tweeted that it was “experiencing network issues with #AWS”, and Cirrus Insight.

The Twitter sphere appeared, if anything confused at the lack of information on AWS’ global status page. Giedrius Banaitis tweeted that “as always, Twitter …