For all those that preach storing your files offsite using a “cloud” service, you may want to make sure you also have an onsite backup as well. Both Amazon’s EC2 and Microsoft’s Azure have suffered several recent outages, causing all sorts of mayhem for different sites. Personally, I wouldn’t mind being there to help fix it. I’m good at that stuff!

I’m not posting this to downplay what’s going on with Amazon’s EC2. Nor am I doing so because I’ve heard Microsoft or Microsoft partners trying to use Amazon’s EC2 outage as a way to paint Azure as superior. (In fact, one member of the Azure team tweeted today that he hoped no one at Microsoft would do such a thing.)