[floodfx]

I'll probably be downvoted for this but seems to me the root cause of this problem is Reddit's architectural decision to remain in a single availability zone. If it wasn't EBS it could have been some other issue related to the single AZ that could have brought the site down. Blaming EBS, particularly if you knew it to be a potential weakness in your architecture, seems like a deflection of responsibility.

[snorkel]

Perhaps reddit could've mitigated some downtime with some cross-zone redundancy, but the underlying frustration is that Amazon does not provide a well behaved storage solution, which is a very critical infrastructure component for most web services.

[fuzzmeister]

Exactly. While Amazon clearly tries to make single-zone reliability as good as possible, I think they expect customers to use a multi-AZ setup if they expect true reliability.