Nick Carr relays the news tat Amazon's S3 service is having issues:

There are reports that Amazon's Simple Storage Service - called S3 - suffered a "massive" outage this morning, beginning at about 7:30 am eastern time. At 9:03, an Amazon official posted a note in the service's customer forum, saying, "We can confirm the high error rate you’re experiencing. While we don’t have an ETA at this point, we’re working as quickly as possible to restore performance. We’ll provide updates as soon as we have them." A poster at Hacker News reports that the service is now "back up," but another poster says that service remains "spotty."

One of our customers is using S3 in a web app they have deployed, but they also have the ability to "flip a switch" and serve everything locally. I think that's a very prudent move - the alternate may be another utility supplier, but you need an alternate. If your business depends on your web presence, you simply can't afford to have a single point of failure.

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