[leorocky]

I've never seen S3 go down, the availability is 5 9's. EC2 has had outages in the past.

[justinsb]

S3 went down in 2008 for a few hours. Lots of coverage at the time. e.g. http://techcrunch.com/2008/02/15/amazon-web-services-goes-do...

[acdha]

A couple hours for one location in 6 years is hardly the routine occurrence which the original commenter was claiming

[justinsb]

I wasn't saying it was, merely reporting the facts! S3 targets four nines uptime; which is really good but not infallible. For most apps though, I think it's reasonable to accept that if S3 is offline, the app is offline also.

[tedchs]

All of AWS has changed significantly in the past 6 years. I think it's disingenuous to say that an outage from that era, for any provider, influences your thinking nowadays.

[justinsb]

I'm not sure S3 has changed nearly as much as the rest of AWS, which is probably why it is so stable. Regardless, the point is that outages can happen to S3 as well, and have; just because it hasn't happened for a few years doesn't mean than 99.99% = 100%.

[noir_lord]

In fairness high availability is usually measure per annum, on that metric S3 is 100% for the last 5 years.

Also a few years doesn't really imply 6 years to me.