Before I left, my manager (after a reorg) was a totally incompetant jerk whose prior training was a degree in "criminal justice". He knew nothing about software development, and had been at amazon his whole career- 7 years managing programmers.
I am amazed that they have only a few days of downtime a year.
I wouldn't be using S3 myself, except that (contrary to advertisements) its not run on the same "proven" infrastructure as their ecommerce platform-- but a new one built by a seperate team, and that team isn't hobbled by the incompetance that has built up over the years on the ecommerce engineering side.
Update: Still working fine 2:48 eastern. My s3 files and amazon.com.