(The Hosting News) – A recent downtime hitting popular cloud platform Amazon Web Services had a profound effect on websites relying on its presence. According to a report from ZDNet.com, websites such as a Quora faced downtime last week.

The incident originated from Amazon’s Virginia data center and specifically affected the Elastic Compute Cloud. A recent status report from the company shed light on just how the downtime occurred.

“At approximately 8:44PM PDT, there was a cable fault in the high voltage Utility power distribution system.  Two Utility substations that feed the impacted Availability Zone went offline, causing the entire Availability Zone to fail over to generator power. All EC2 instances and EBS volumes successfully transferred to back-up generator power,” commented the company.

However, the trouble didn’t end there. A breaker designed to help in the backup process was improperly configured, leading to an instance of no backup, thus causing the downtime. The fix came when Amazon restored its generator fan.

Amazon has had its fair share of tech glitches with the popular cloud platform in the past. In August of last year, the company had another outage originating from a data center in Dublin, Ireland. Meanwhile, Amazon announced earlier this month that one trillion objects had been stored in Amazon S3, a solution on the platform.

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