News just crossed the wire that some of Amazon’s AWS services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Relational Database service are experiencing some technical difficulties. Details of these difficulties and their cause are scarce, but Amazon is currently “working towards resolution” of the issues, which include API errors, volume latencies and delayed launches for EBS backed EC2 instances. A number of major social media companies in the affected Availability Zones effected, and some of the most prominent ones have been affected.

“HootSuite, Reddit and Foursquare are some of the sites which are reliant on Amazon AWS, and all of them are either currently down or have recently experienced downtime or latency issues.”

While it is not confirmed whether or not the problems are related, Q&A social network Quora Papar.li and others are unavailable to some users. The company first began nvestigating connectivity and latency issues around EC2 instances in its U.S. East Coast region at 4:41 a.m. Eastern time.

Outages are inevitable, and as more and more companies and applications move to the cloud, the bigger the impact of these kinds of difficulties will be. Still, that doesn’t deter users from using Amazon’s and similar cloud services. Further, this growing popularity is exactly what drove a recent partnership between AWS and online demo solutions and cloud computing initiatives company Runaware. The partnership will allow AWS to utilize Runaware’s SaaS-based service when migrating third party applications to its Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) platform. Amazon will also resell Runaware’s TestDrive, TD Insight and Runaware in the Clouds offerings.

Another fairly recent and even notable update Amazon is the launch of Cloud Drive, its new music-centric personal cloud storage service. A number of plans are available to users, though Amazon is having some difficulties around obtaining label rights.

Uptime is one of the most pressing concerns in the cloud, and Japan-based datacenters may just take a hit this summer. Scheduled blackouts set because of the shortage in energy due to the compromised nuclear reactors, and may have a serious affect on datacenters and services hosted all across the island nation.