While the world+dog claims that cloud-based technology is going to be where it is at, it appears that early adopters are suffering.

Scores of websites and Internet services like Foursquare and Reddit crashed or had limited availability because of problems at a data centre run by Amazon. It seems that such outfits came to rely on Amazon's cloud-based Web Services. While AWS is generally considered reliable because it uses vast numbers of computers, spread out in different data centres the fact that it went tits up so easily is probably a cause for concern. Amazon said the trouble started early in the morning at a data centre in Northern Virginia.  It refused to give any other details.

Meanwhile GPS outift, Foursquare was still experiencing technical issues last night. Social media site Hootsuite  was down completely, as was questions-and-answers site Quora. Reddit was in "emergency read-only mode." The outage will be jolly bad for CEO Jeff Bezos who want his cloud-based services to be as large as Amazon's retail business. One of the biggest problems that users have with cloud-based set ups is that if something goes wrong you rely on someone else to fix it.  If there is a huge outage then you may not have access to your data for some time.

Oddly one the biggest advantages of this sort of system is that is that it is supposed to have lots of back-up.  In this case the back-up appeared to be out-to-lunch with a very attractive person and not that keen to get back to the office.