If you’re finding it hard to see what your friend’s are up to on Instagram, or you’ve failed to post images of that bowl of ice cream you devoured earlier, it’s because Instagram was one of a number of popular web services that experienced a serious outage for several hours late on Sunday.

Instagram was first to acknowledge the service interruption via Twitter.  Other services that experienced the interruption included Vine, Netflix, Heroku, Airbnb and IFTTT, all of whom (like Instagram) rely on servers that are based on Amazon Web Services.

The problem started at 16:00 Eastern time or 21:00 GMT Sunday, and continued for several hours. During the service interruption, users experienced difficulty in accessing the login pages of the aforementioned sites, while those who successfully managed to login discovered that pages took longer to update.

The interruption was short-lived and happily, was resolved within a few hours.  The problem was later identified as the “partial failure of a networking device” in AWS.

AWS acknowledged that it has been having issues in its North Virginia data center, identifying issues in its EC2, relational database, and load-balancing services.

At 2:21 PM PDT, Amazon put out the following statement:

“We have identified and fixed the root cause of the performance issue. EBS backed instance launches are now operating normally. Most previously impacted volumes are now operating normally and we will continue to work on instances and volumes that are still experiencing degraded performance.”

The post was soon followed by a second announcement at 2:45 PM PDT:

“We have identified and fixed the root cause of the connectivity issue affecting load balancers in a single availability zone. The connectivity impact has been mitigated for load balancers with back-end instances in multiple availability zones. We continue to work on load balancers that are still seeing connectivity issues,” .

The problem has been solved, the services are now running smoothly, which means that people can get back to posting photos of food they are about to eat and snippets of whatever else they like to share. We’ll be keeping an eye out in case there are any further problems.