Social link site , Q&A site , social media monitor , geolocation tool , iPhone app store , and programmer sites and have all been affected. A quick reveals many more. (Here's my , from Nicolethebear: "Dear Amazon EC2--have you tried ?")

As I write this Friday morning, the downtime is continuing as Amazon engineers fight to fix things. The outage was caused that filled up all available storage. More information can be found at .

Inevitable finger-wagging is taking place, with many claiming they're vindicated. But it's less of a drama than it might appear. I haven't yet met a computer that , and I'm not sure why we expect cloud computing to be any different. Amazon's uptime has been pretty exceptional otherwise.

What's been exposed, however, is how much , of which EC2 is a key component, underpins the Internet as we know it today. I'd even argue that AWS directly boosts the economy by allowing entrepreneurs to get even the grandest computing plans off the ground quickly.

The fact you pay for only what you use with AWS, with no upfront fees, is in itself extraordinary. Prior to AWS, companies liked users to sign up for lengthy contracts and charge fees that reflected what they could get away with, rather than what things actually cost. AWS doesn't play these kind of power games.