Amazon has posted a post-mortem analysis on last week's extended Simple Storage Service (S3) outage, if it matters. I suppose it's a good indication that the company is continuing its committment to improving communications about such difficulties with its customers, and I do subscribe to the theory that you can ascribe more trust to a process that is more open, but I think in this case it is probably the fact of the outage that is more important than the causes. You sign up for a cloud service so you don't have to worry about the technical difficulties like gossip protocol failures and such. It's nice that they are demonstrating their troubleshooting and corrective actions, but it doesn't explain in the slightest why all the supposed expertise and experience behind S3 garnered from Amazon's internal operations seems to be failing for external customers, but not for the company itself. That's the larger question, and Amazon does not seem eager to answer to it just yet.