Amazon offers automatic credit for S3 outage

Customers affected by Sunday's outage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service, an online data storage plan, won't have to do anything to get credit for the hours-long glitch.

Some Amazon Web Services were down for hours on July 20.

(Credit: Amazon)

"We'll be announcing on the developer forum momentarily that we'll be waiving our standard SLA (service-level agreement) process and applying the appropriate service credit to all affected customers for the July billing period," the company said Monday evening in a statement about the S3 outage. "Customers will not need to send us an e-mail to request their credits, as these will be automatically applied. This transaction will be reflected in our customers' August billing statements."

S3 provides an online mechanism where customers can pay to store data according to the amount they need stored. It's one of a host of Amazon Web Services, but it's the only one so far covered by a service-level agreement that promises high reliability.

Amazon's S3 and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are two of prominent examples of the concept of cloud computing, in which specialists offer online services on which others can base their own applications. Another variety of cloud computing offers more specific services such as online e-mail or office suites from Zoho, Google, Adobe, and Yahoo.