cloud Security: If you don't own the server - you don't own the data

ouch... Lightning Strike Disrupts Amazon's EC2 Cloud

"Amazon  .... experience some major network connectivity issues ... company’s cloud servers  .... taken offline by lightning.
 ... many customers are likely to have to wait for a couple of days at least until the EC2 Elastic Cloud services start operating again."

"We know many of you are anxiously waiting for your instances and volumes to become available and we want to give you more detail on why the recovery of the remaining instances and volumes is taking so long," Amazon said in a statement, IT Pro reports.

"Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of EBS servers lost power and require manual operations before volumes can be restored,” the company added.

Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/2011/08/08/lightning-strike-disrupts-amazons-ec2-cloud/#ixzz1USgCVnPl

An update, August 10th : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/10/amazon_says_sorry_for_issues/

"Efforts to bring EC2 back online were delayed as the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) servers required manual operations before they could restore customer volumes ... Amazon said on Monday it would resolve the process in 48 hours but wrote to customers yesterday informing them it had discovered an error in EBS software which "incorrectly deleted" one or more blocks when cleaning snapshots.
"The root cause was a software error that caused the snapshot references to a subset of blocks to be missed during the reference counting process," the company said."

Like one of the customers noted, you have to be big to reliably use the cloud. Otherwise there may be problems if you don't provide a fallback backup scenario.