[jeffbarr]

The original object size limit for S3 was 5 GB, as noted in my 2006 blog post:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_s3/

I do not know if this has anything to do with the cliff that you saw.

[cperciva]

Pretty sure that's not related. For one thing I don't think EBS snapshots are stored in S3 as 5 GB segments.

[bigiain]

This is why I keep reading the comments here.

Deep deep greybeard wisdom from the founding fathers of modern computing.