Michael Nygard on the recent Amazon S3 outage

"It's a new way of doing business, and some of the most innovative
software development, applied at the largest scales. Bugs will creep
in.

In fact, I'd expect to find more cases of odd emergent behavior at large scale.

Second, the back of my envelope still shows S3 at 99.94% availability
for the year. That's better than most data center providers. It's
certainly better than most corporate IT departments do."

http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2008/07/s3_outage_report_and_perspecti.html