Amazon on Friday was still wrangling with troubles at its Web hosting service used by Foursquare, Quora, Reddit and other popular websites.
Amazon EC2 was being slowly restored a day after the onset of disruptive problems, but it may take a while to fully recover, according to updates on the service's online status dashboard.
"When a service that is heavily redundant, like this one is, goes out of band this long, they have a serious problem and they don't have their arms around it," said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.
Websites hosted by Amazon EC2 were sluggish or knocked offline on Thursday and the company has yet to disclose a cause.
"These things are supposed to be incredibly bulletproof so it would take something serious to cause a problem like this," Enderle said of datacenters designed to host websites or software in the Internet "cloud."
A problem disrupting the entire service could range from a flawed update pushed system-wide to sabotage by a disgruntled employee with high-level access to the network, according to Enderle.
"This won't derail the shift to the cloud," Enderle said of Amazon EC2 troubles. "It will just remind people the cloud isn't bulletproof and you need redundancy, either into another cloud service or your own proprietary systems."
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