This is Amazon’s second major outage this year, and given how many sites rely on the service it’s a real nightmare when it goes down. It’s a little concerning to think about some of the other third-party providers that could exhibit similar problems. For example, those using Yahoo‘s YUI library might well be accessing them from Yahoo’s JavaScript site, rather than hosting the files themselves. In the even that these go down, the sites will likely be rendered useless, in a rather ungraceful manner. Fortunately, JavaScript, CSS, and the like can all be easily hosted locally. Hundreds of gigabytes of photos are not so easy to have local backups of.

Youniverse isn’t the only site that uses S3 as a major provider of service. SmugMug have completely taken down their site until S3 is running properly again, and Twitter are not showing profile images.

Amazon’s Status Blog indicates that they’ve solved the problem, and are making “incremental progress”. Looks like we’re going to have to come up with a fallback solution for when S3 goes belly-up again!