The earthquake was centered in Virginia and hit just before 2 p.m. local time with a magnitude of 5.8, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That's not particularly big by global standards, but it was enough to shake buildings and send people pouring into the streets in Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C., according to news reports. It was the biggest earthquake to hit Virginia since 1897, .

Amazon Web Services, which operates a large data center in Virginia, said its services were unaffected. "All AWS services in the US East region are operating normally at the present time," a spokeswoman said via e-mail.

One AWS customer did report a brief uptick in page loading times. SeatGeek, a search site for tickets, saw a "pretty nasty" spike in its page response times when the earthquake struck.

"Over here at SeatGeek, we were excitedly discussing the tremor when Mike, our trusty sysadmin, realized that our Amazon AWS servers were all in Virginia, right near the epicenter," the company said in a , where it posted a graph showing the slowdown.

"Lessons Learned? 1) Earthquakes make Web Servers sad [and] 2) Real time system monitoring is awesome," the company wrote. The spike lasted about two minutes, SeatGeek said.