Amazon.com is experiencing a serious outage this morning with its Elastic Compute Cloud and other Web services, causing downtime at major sites such as HootSuite, Reddit and Foursquare. We’re tracking the issue and will update the post as we learn more, but Twitter is buzzing with complaints.

“The sky is falling! Amazon’s cloud seems to be down (raining?) so we’re experiencing some issues too. Be back soon!,” read a Tweet from mobile social gaming site SCVNGR.

Amazon Web Services “health dashboard” indicates problems with Elastic Compute Cloud servers in Northern Virginia, with the company reporting “instance connectivity, latency and error rates.” AWS’s Elastic Beanstalk and Relational Database Service also are experiencing problems.

It is unclear whether the problems are impacting sites in the Pacific Northwest, so let us know in the comments if you are an Amazon Web Services customer and experiencing troubles.

Many third party companies turn to Amazon.com to host their applications, and when the AWS service goes down hundreds or thousands of services can go down with it.

The issues started at 1:41 a.m. when Amazon issued an alert about Elastic Compute Cloud. As of 6:09 a.m., the company had said that “EBS API errors and volume latencies in the affected availability zone remain. We are continuing to work towards a resolution.”

UPDATE FROM AMAZON.COM AT 10:26 AM:

We have made significant progress in stabilizing the affected EBS control plane service. EC2 API calls that do not involve EBS resources in the affected Availability Zone are now seeing significantly reduced failures and latency and are continuing to recover. We have also brought additional capacity online in the affected Availability Zone and stuck EBS volumes (those that were being remirrored) are beginning to recover. We cannot yet estimate when these volumes will be completely recovered, but we will provide an estimate as soon as we have sufficient data to estimate the recovery. We have all available resources working to restore full service functionality as soon as possible. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.