( CNN ) -- An outage of one of Amazon 's cloud computing data centers knocked out popular sites like Reddit , Foursquare Pinterest and TMZ for some users on Monday . The outages , which began early afternoon Eastern time , appeared to be gradually improving as the afternoon went on . As of about 5 p.m . ET , Amazon Web Services was reporting `` degraded '' performance at one of its centers in northern Virginia . In addition to online retail , Amazon rents cloud storage space for clients to store Web data . Other sites that were impacted included Instagram , Flipboard , AirBnB , Imgur and GetGlue . During the height of the outages , many took to Twitter to complain and seek solace . Here are some of their updates . If you are unable to see the Storify below , click here . . CNN 's Doug Gross contributed to this report .
Outage of Amazon data center blamed for some , other sites going down for some . Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , AirBnB also affected .