I wouldn't say that the linkbait title is completely wrong, but the author is misguided about the severity and scope of the Amazon downtime. If you read Quora'

I wouldn't say that the linkbait title is completely wrong, but the author is misguided about the severity and scope of the Amazon downtime. If you read Quora's account [1], it's clear that this was regionwide, not just limited to a single availability zone. This debunks the misguided understanding that simply having slave instances in different availability zones will be enough for ensuring availability. While that's what you would have expected from Amazon (and the name "Availability Zones"), that's not what happened. The issue wasn't necessarily that Amazon had downtimes--you'd be hard-pressed to find a provider that has never been down. The issue was the scope and duration of the downtime that demonstrated that availability zones mean little in terms of service redundancy. [1] http://www.quora.com/Quora-Outage-April-21-22-2011/What-caused-the-Quora-problems-outage-in-April-2011 http://www.quora.com/Quora-Outage-April-21-22-2011/What-caus...