Since Christmas an increase in response times have been detected from Amazon's EC2 service by Cloudkick, a cloud performance monitoring company.

An average ping latency of 50ms is relatively low and normal. However, Cloudkick has been measuring latencies of up to 1000ms since the 22nd December.

One source, Alan Williamson's Blog, claims this is due to over subscription.

Amazon spokesperson Kay Kinton denies the cloud services vendor is having overcapacity issues. Kinton stated that the issues seen by Williamson and Cloudkick are not capacity related, and has pledged to work with customers experiencing problems.

Amazon has buit a dominant position in the cloud computing market, and leverages its leadership position by consistently cutting prices and adding features. The emergence of cloud performance monitoring tools mean that cloud vendors are under increasing scrutiny. Kinton stressed that to date Amazon has met all of its service level agreements.