Amazon.com Inc.'s data storage service was down for several hours

Amazon.com Inc.'s data storage service was down for several hours on Friday morning, leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.

As of around noon (EST), the issue had been fixed, according to an Amazon employee posting on a user group forum. "This morning's issue has been resolved and the system is continuing to recover," wrote Kathrin, the Amazon employee.

She said that the company plans to post technical information about what exactly happened, but its first priority is to make sure the system is stable.

Companies use Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known as S3, to store and quickly retrieve large amounts of data, often to run Web sites and services.

A press spokesman said that one of three geographic locations for the service was unreachable for about two hours. "We've been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it," said Drew Herdener in a statement.

Many customers appeared not to have gotten that communication. They complained on the forum about a lack of information from Amazon about the outage and when it would be fixed. One suggested that Amazon could have at least posted a message on the front page of the Web services site, so that customers would be aware that the problem wasn't on their end

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