[citation][nom]rad666[/nom]And that is why I hate "the cloud"...[/citation]
And what do you propose to do otherwise? There would be no difference between Foursquare hosting their own services and Amazon hosting those services, except that it would cost Foursquare a whole lot more to do the former than the latter. Even if every single website was hosted on private servers, those servers would still have to be redundant, with some sort of scheme to keep them up and running. "The Cloud" is just a B.S. term people came up with the sell crap. The internet has always been "the cloud". When you read a news story online, that story is hosted on a non-local webserver (in the cloud). A non-cloud news-source would be a newspaper, where the news is printed on paper physically in your possession. But if that paper gets lost or destroyed, you have to buy a new one. In "the cloud", if that news webserver goes down, there's a second one somewhere to ramp up and replace it.
Even if you download your email and store it locally on your PC, your email service is still "in the cloud". When someone sends you an email to douche-at-yahoo.com, it's the "cloudy" nature of Yahoo! that lets that email get to you, even if one set of mail servers is down. If you simply ran your own email server on your home network, you might miss an email if your connection went down for a decent length of time.
The cloud didn't fail here, Amazon did.