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In what is likely to cause increased doubts in the viability of cloud-based servers and systems, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) crashed last week. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. Which is to say, computer systems have crashed before. Web servers have gone down and web sites have become inaccessible. Email servers have gone down and customers have been without their electronic mail for extended periods of time as a result. In fact, in the days of network television (as in ONLY network television) broadcasters had their signal go out and the channel would go dark for a period of time. So the idea that a company might suffer an outage and we would lose signal for a time, that is not new.