And for those companies that sell cloud services, it means they now have to sell against a new benchmark in unreliability.

Amazon is suffering a partial outage, now in its second day, that is affecting what may be a large number of sites, .

Thanks to Amazon, supporters are going to have a tough time arguing that the uptime delivered by services is superior to anything corporate IT can deliver. That's a problem compounded by Amazon itself. Its users aren't certain just what the problem is or when it'll be fixed.

One person who knows about the problems ahead is Tref Laplante, the CEO WorkXpress, who says the Amazon outage "is going to be devastating."

WorkXpress is a platform as a service. It has created an entirely visual drag-and-drop development environment using Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP to allow app development without writing code. Its users, which include many businesses, have built apps used in medical, real estate, manufacturing and other industries.