Yep, no doubt. Absolutely baffles me though why any company would use something like Amazon of all things to act as their server.
Many companies (including lots in the Fortune 500) use Amazon Web Services as it’s one of the largest Web hosting options out there.
This whole thing is going to hurt Amazon's business. I'm not sure they even care, but they seemed to have a bit of a conservative streak in picking their corporate locations.
Amazon, Microsoft and other cloud services providers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and years of effort to convince IT managers all over the world to run their software on the cloud provider's hardware. There are some advantages to doing so, such as reducing the need to acquire and manage hardware, redundancy, and the ease and low cost of scaling up services on cloud platforms.
But nowhere in the marketing message was the idea that a company could instantly lose its IT system if the cloud provider shut it down. And few companies would ever sign up for such a service if they thought the risk of it just being taken out from under them was possible. Now every buyer of cloud services knows that their entire IT platform and all of its features could disappear instantly. Even government customers must now realize that a rogue actor in a cloud provider could shut them down at will.
Amazon has done almost immeasurable damage to the cloud services industry. Every public company should be forced to add a risk of their IT systems being shut down by their cloud services provider to their SEC filings, and every smart company should be building an alternative IT platform as quickly as possible.
Any company depending on cloud based computing services needs to develop alternatives, and the market for company owned and controlled hardware and systems is likely to grow dramatically.