We received this email this morning from RightScale, an ADS partner.

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Dear Customer,

At 7:35 EST Amazon S3 service started given 503 service unavailable messages. We have contacted Amazon and they have confirmed the problem and they are working on resolving it. The main effect on our customers is that 10-minute backups are not happening and operations that rely on S3 fail. Amazon has not giving an expected time to resolution yet. We will keep you informed. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The RightScale Team.
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We received this soon after we noticed the outage ourselves. This type of information is extremely important to get out to clients when situations such as downtime occur, so that they are not surprised and you don’t hear the “why didn’t you tell me.” Transparency, honesty, and communication are the keys to great business relationships.

UPDATE

Soon after I put up the post S3 is back up. Happy days.

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