I, like a lot of others, make use of the Amazon S3 service for data storage "in the cloud". The service is a huge success and normally behaves extremely stable.
Yesterday there was a very large S3 outage which caused many online companies to suffer outages as well. There was an interesting piece over at ReadWriteWeb asking "How Much Is To Much?".
I've been using S3 for nearly 2 years and have only experienced trouble twice. I wrote about the previous experience and that outage lasted about 3 hours. Yesterday however the outage was more than 6 hours!
Now I use S3 for the static media on many websites, including this site. Since it's my personal blog it's no big deal, but I also use it for many sites that are for profit, including my latest service: SmartJabber.
Yesterdays outage effected paying customers of mine. They have been understanding but I have to ask myself if a change may be needed to prevent future outages that last this long. The idea of using Amazon S3 is that, in theory, the service can't go down. It's a large cluster of servers whose purpose is to host their customers data securely and with a very high availability.
In the grand scheme of things, my data is probably safer more stable remaining with Amazon. Though I do hate the feeling of having my hands tied when the service is down.
Others out there seem to share my opinion of sticking with Amazon, and others don't.