EC2 Outage

A lot of companies rely on EC2 to do video trans-coding and other video effects. It's a quick way to scale without having to purchase and maintain hardware.  The down side, there is no fail over, no way to recover your services other then wait till Amazon gets back and running.

From Slashdot:   EC2 Outage Shows How Much the Net Relies On Amazon
"Much has been written about the recent EC2/EBS outage, but Keir Thomas at PC World has a different take: it's shown how much cutting-edge Internet infrastructure relies on Amazon, and we should be grateful. Quoting: 'Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution.'"An article at O'Reilly comes to a similarly positive conclusion from a different angle.