The day the cloud fell on earth

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Since 10.30 CET all Amazon EC2 instances located in the US-EAST region are basically unreachable or unusable.
As i have several web apps running over there, this is a problem for me.

It's a pity because I'm (still) really enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by an infrastructure like Amazon EC2 for a small company like mine, but clearly a system suffering a 6-hours (so far) outage could be regarded as unreliable by someone else and i started seeing comments of this tenor in the AWS forum from people who are really upset or definitely angry.

It's interesting to note that a 6-hours outage if measured over a year is still less than a total 0.1% downtime.
I don't know if most SLAs deal with downtime in terms of hours per year, at any rate this is the first unscheduled downtime i experienced thus far (and hopefully the last one for some time in the future...).

Given the current situation there is very little that i can do to help, other than reporting when it starts working again or any problems that are still existing.

Clearly a big company, in order to avoid service disruption like what we are experiencing today, should set up a failover infrastructure based on instances distributed across several data centers, but for "normal" companies i guess this is simply not affordable in terms of costs.

I wonder if Amazon will ever explain the reason of the failure, it will be interesting to know if this mess was caused by some 20-cent component that suddenly broke down or by some expensive piece of hardware.