Amazon, those masters of tactful understatement, say:
> 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.
> 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.
While it is not solely AWS' fault (cloud !== no need to do proper engineering) reddit etc. is down, I do have my doubts that "degraded performance" makes all of the ec2 instances reddit runs on go haywire and shuts down the entire website, leaving a static "come back later" html page.
Effectively, this is exactly how it is.
> 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.