Amazon’s EC2 cloud went dark last week–knocking sites like Foursquare, Reddit, and Quora offline, and affecting hundreds of Amazon cloud customers. The outage is a black eye for the young cloud services industry and gives businesses a reason to think twice about trusting servers or data storage in the cloud.

The sales pitch for the cloud is like a travel brochure, or a military recruiting speech. They tell you all of the features and benefits–cost-effective, scalable, resilient–but fail to mention the down sides like the fact that if the cloud data center is offline, so is your business.