Having not heard of E2 before (it never seems to come up in the comparisons the other object-storage providers do to make themselves look good) — do you know why it has such bad availability? "Weeks of downtime" sounds crazy for a business focused on storage.

If they aren't also failing at durability, then it wouldn't be any of the classical problems associated with running a storage cluster. Do they just... not bother with online maintenance / upgrades / hardware transitions?