Amazon Web Services suffers Friday 13th outage

• AWS is used by many tech start-ups and increasingly largest companies too
• Friday outage follows similar disruption in late August

SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon Web Services, the popular cloud computing service run by Amazon.com, suffered an outage on Friday.

AWS, as the service is known, said on its monitoring website that was "investigating network connectivity issues" in data centers it runs in the Northern Virginia area.

AWS is used by lots of start-up Internet companies and increasingly by large enterprises including Netflix and NASA. When AWS goes down, it can disrupt a notable portion of Internet activity, sometimes for hours at a time.

AWS cloud services, such as database offering Redshift, were affected by the Northern Virginia outage on Friday. Some other services, such as Amazon's Simple Email Service, were back up by 11.24 am, Eastern time, according to Amazon's monitoring web site.

A similar outage in late August affected web and mobile services including Instagram, Vine, Airbnb and Netflix, according to reports.

These outages are a sensitive issue for Amazon because the company is trying to win more enterprise customers and these large companies need their computing services to be reliable.

However, AWS and some big customers including Netflix argue that all IT services, not just cloud-based ones, have outages and companies need to set their systems up to handle such hiccups.