Recently, we had a look at Instagram and Vine, and how the two services were both growing yet likely to butt heads thanks to the comparatively similar services of the two. But recently, both companies were put on comparable footing—temporarily out of service—when an outage struck Amazon once again, this time in the Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) sector.

Starting on Sunday afternoon, word hit the status dashboard for Amazon Web Services users that conditions of “degraded performance” were in effect on the EC2 Web service, as well as a set of what were described as “connectivity issues for load balancers” for the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) system. Since both operations were headquartered in northern Virginia, it was safe to say that the issue was largely localized, though significant.

Though the problems didn't last long—about an hour by some reports, and were not only identified by around 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, but largely repaired at 6:00 p.m. Pacific—the problems did strike hard, hitting both Instagram and Vine. Reports indicate that the problems were caused by what was described as “a 'grey' partial failure with a networking device.” Said partial failure then resulted in a packet loss, and the device was removed from service with an eye toward figuring out just how it partially failed in the first place. Instagram and Vine, at last report, were both back online and fully operational by Monday morning.

Those with a more suspicious bent are already likely drawing some conclusions. After all, just a week ago today, the complete Amazon service temporarily went down for many users. But then, so too did the entire Nasdaq exchange, right alongside an outage at Google. That's four big outages in the space of a little over a week. It's easy to look at the whole thing and just chalk it all up to coincidence. After all, five-nines availability is still pretty much the top of the heap, and that means there's .001 percent downtime that needs to come into play.

It's not so much the downtime that's unusual—into each server some downtime must fall, to misquote the song—but it's the location, and the concentration, that's so odd. It would be one thing if Amazon had its outage back in, say, March, and the Nasdaq lost ground in May, and Google (News - Alert) got hit in August. We'd make note of it—losing Google or Amazon or the Nasdaq is a big thing and should be noted—but then, there would be nothing more to say on the subject. Now, we're looking at everybody's downtime hitting in a very narrow band, and that by itself is noteworthy.

Just what's going on here is still somewhat unclear. Indeed, this may all just be an incredible coincidence. But with four major sites hit with downtime in the space of about a week, it's enough to leave most anyone wondering if an event of greater significance is at play here.