Internet’s Down

Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud volumes for N. Virginia is down and they are having trouble launching new instances.

Here’s the full text direct from the console:

10:38 AM PDT We are currently investigating degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
11:11 AM PDT We can confirm degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances using affected EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance.
11:26 AM PDT We are currently experiencing degraded performance for EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. New launches for EBS backed instances are failing and instances using affected EBS volumes will experience degraded performance.
12:32 PM PDT We are working on recovering the impacted EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
1:02 PM PDT We continue to work to resolve the issue affecting EBS volumes in a single availability zone in the US-EAST-1 region. The AWS Management Console for EC2 indicates which availability zone is impaired.

EC2 instances and EBS volumes outside of this availability zone are operating normally. Customers can launch replacement instances in the unaffected availability zones but may experience elevated launch latencies or receive ResourceLimitExceeded errors on their API calls, which are being issued to manage load on the system during recovery. Customers receiving this error can retry failed requests.

UPDATE: As I write this, I’m seeing services coming back up.

A Novel Approach to High Frequency Trading

Interesting…

HFT has proven to be singularly destructive. Despite the claims of it defenders, it does not increase market liquidity; it merely increases trading volumes without improving ease of execution. 60% of US stock market trading volume comes from HFT. HFT has undermined how markets operate. Institutional investors have diverted some of their trades to “dark pools” to escape the pred Retail traders have become increasingly distrustful of equity markets, thanks to HFT-related debacles like the flash crash and Kraft’s first trading day at NASDAQ, when its initial trades had to be cancelled.

via It’s Time for a Tax to Kill High Frequency Trading « naked capitalism.