[cookiecaper]

Technical failures in complex applications are not always able to be "clearly communicated". I don't use EC2 in any major capacity so I may be wrong here, but my understanding of the failure is that Amazon acknowledged the system had failed and that they were working to get the systems back up. I don't know what else you expect in the midst of an outage -- the fact is that if the technical failures were foreseen and planned, there wouldn't be an outage, so you have to give the technicians time to figure out what happened and figure out a way to fix it.

The details you want don't come until the crisis is over and the users are back online. Occasionally you may be able to get a meaningful ETA, but it really depends on the nature of the failure(s) that caused the outage. I'm glad Amazon didn't cave to the pressure and just throw a random guess out.