Assuming the problem is indeed with EBS, I would say this should be a warning sign to anyone considering going with a PaaS provider, which Amazon is quickly becoming, instead of an IaaS provider like Slicehost or Linode. The increased complexity of their offering makes it more likely that things will break, leaving you locked in. I did a 15 minute talk on the subject, which you can check out here: http://iforum.com.u…
Every time someone makes the claim that downtime should be a warning sign about going with a PaaS provider (or, indeed, an IaaS provider, or in some cases, people even make this claim about going with someone else's Data Center) - I always respond: "And why do you believe that you would do any better?" Every environment I've been involved in as an operations professional for the last 15 years has experienced downtime…
The thing to remember is that even if you could do better -- and it is certainly possible -- your customers might not pay you for it. It will cost you, a lot, to build a significantly better system than AWS. Reliability is about redundancy, and redundancy is synonymous with paying for things that sit idle for years at a time, and paying for the hardware and personnel to run disaster drills over and over, and customers hate that. Reliability is also about avoiding excessive complexity and limiting the rate at which you change things, and customers hate that too. If they wanted highly reliable, slow-changing established tech they'd be using land-line phones, not Quora or Reddit.