I think the gp was saying that the brand— as in, the perception of AWS— will suffer, not the actual services.

Anyone with an ounce of server knowledge would know it's impossible to keep a website up for 100% of the time, so downtime at Amazon is understandable, but maybe the average Joe Manager is deciding between Rackspace and AWS and happens to visit amazon.com during this downtime. "If Amazon can't even keep their bread-and-butter running, how can I trust them with something like AWS?" he might say.

> Anyone with an ounce of server knowledge would know it's impossible to keep a website up for 100% of the time

As far as I know Google has 100% uptime, so it's not impossible. May not be 100% for every geographical location but that's partly because of things Google cannot control nor make redundant.

Even if Amazon.com != AWS, it is still bad for the Amazon Brand which encompasses AWS.

If they can't keep their own server up, how can you trust them with yours?

An unfair argument, perhaps, but one that impacts them all the same.

Apparently, Amazon.com switched to AWS in 2011 http://www.quora.com/Amazon/Does-Amazon-com-use-Amazon-AWS.

I was at the AWS Summit in NYC last week and Werner claims that they only completed the transition of retail to AWS fairly recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo1W92Teqx4