"What will take a hit is the image of this technology as being one you can depend on, and that image was critically damaged today," he added. "If the outage continues for long, it could set back growth of this service years and permanently kill efforts by many to use this service in the future."

Given how high profile the outage has been, it may be hard to dismiss - especially for people who have to decide whether they're moving their enterprise to the cloud.

"This provides a massive showcase of the risk associated with these kinds of services, which are sold like utilities but don't yet have the reliability we expect of most utilities," said Enderle. "The impression being set today, if the outage continues, may take five to 10 years to fully recover from."

Keith Shaw chats with Network World's Jon Brodkin about the Amazon EC2 cloud service outage that brought down some high-profile Web sites on Thursday.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at or subscribe to . Her e-mail address is .