Amazon 'S3' Server Offline for Hours

Part of Amazon.com’s 2-year-old Simple Storage Service went down for several hours Friday, leaving some customers in the dark and unable to access their own files, reports PC World. The pay-as-you-go “S3” service is used by companies to run websites and warehouse large amounts of data. The outage was resolved by 7am Pacific Time for most users.

The service interruption occurred at one of the three data centers Amazon maintains for their “cloud computing” services and prompted a flurry of activity on the service’s web forum from nervous customers worried about losing data and the impact the outage was having on their businesses. Amazon last year guaranteed 99.9% monthly uptime for S3. (More Amazon.com stories.)