Amazon Web Services is once again experiencing hiccups, suffering service interruptions that are knocking some sites offline. The problems are occurring at the company’s facilities in Northern Virginia, the same location that was impacted by a massive failure last year that gave the Seattle company’s cloud computing services a black eye.

“We can confirm a portion of a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region lost power,” according to a message on the AWS status Web site posted at 10:29 p.m. “We are actively restoring power to the effected EC2 instances and EBS volumes. We are continuing to see increased API errors. Customers might see increased errors trying to launch new instances in the Region.”

Amazon first notified customers of problems at 8:50 p.m.

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.

As with past outages, the Twitter stream has been fast and furious with people wondering what’s going on.

Seattle’s BigDoor, a gamification startup, just Tweeted.

“We are experiencing some intermittent downtime due to the current AWS outtage, we are working to fix these issues ASAP.”

BigDoor’s Keith Smith was highly critical of Amazon’s lack of communication during the past outage, writing a guest post about it for GeekWire: Amazon.com’s real problem isn’t the outage, it’s the communication.

Interestingly, today’s outage comes on the same day that Amazon bolstered customer service for AWS customers, offering 24-hour access to customer service reps by email or phone when problems arise.

UPDATE 11:30 P.M.: Here’s the latest from the AWS status Web site as it relates to its Relational Database Service:

The service is recovering and we are continuing to bring affected Cache Clusters online.

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