Amazon S3 outage causes wailing, gnashing of teeth and slight bruise on upper arm

Twitter and other services relying on Amazon's processing service were hit when it went down. Is it really the future of computing? Amazon's S3 system, which provides a pay-as-you-use processing service, died briefly at the weekend, and with it went many services that had hung their hat on it - such as the organise-your-business company 37Signals, image cacheing by Twitter, and many iPhone apps. The word from Amazon (as noted by Silicon Alley Insider) was that S3 was experiencing "elevated error rates". And so companies that relied on it for this and that (or for everything) were, to put it simply, stuffed, unless they had a fallback position. But with S3 being one of those cloud services, shouldn't it always be there? Hell, the clouds don't go away, do they? Except that they do. A couple of weeks ago Google Docs... [read full story]