For the second time this month, Amazon Web Services is suffering after a power outage at its datacenter in northern Virginia.

“We can confirm that a large number of instances in a single Availability Zone have lost power due to electrical storms in the area. We are actively working to restore power,” Amazon.com wrote in a message at 8:40 p.m. The company later said that power had been restored, but elevated error rates were occurring.

VentureBeat reports that sites such as NetflixInstagramPinterest and Heroku were impacted. You can track the status here.

On June 14th, Amazon’s Northern Virginia datacenter lost power, knocking a number of sites offline.

That’s the same location that was impacted by a massive failure last year that gave the Seattle company’s cloud computing services a black eye. (I am really curious why it always seems to be the Northern Virginia location. Any thoughts?)

Folks on Twitter aren’t happy about the outage, especially those trying to tune in to Netflix on a Friday night. Hundreds of messages are being posted about the outage.

But my favorite Tweet of the bunch comes from Seattle’s Seth Faxon who wrote:

The outage marks bad timing for Amazon, since Google just this week introduced an alternative to AWS dubbed Google Compute Engine.

Let us know in the comments if you’re Web site is down, or if you’ve encountered problems getting on to some of your favorite sites tonight.

UPDATE 9:54 P.M.: Here’s the latest from the Amazon Web Services health dashboard regarding the problems in Northern Virginia.

“EC2 and EBS APIs are once again operating normally. We are continuing to recover impacted instances and volumes.”

UPDATE 8:00 A.M: Amazon Web Services is still struggling nearly 12 hours after an electrical storm on the East Coast knocked out power at one of its data centers. Here’s the latest from the company’s “health dashboard.”

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