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Amazon's S3 system, which provides a pay-as-you-use processing service, died briefly at the weekend, and with it went many services that had hung their hat on it — such as the organize-your-business company 37Signals, image caching by Twitter, and many iPhone apps, reports Charles Arthur of the Guardian.

One of the things that makes the online storage service, Amazon S3, particularly useful for start-ups and heavy users is that it ties in with other Amazon Web Services like the elastic computing cloud and its SimpleDB service. Using all three services relieves start-ups from some of the tasks that generally would require significant time and money up front.

The service in both the US and EU is now fully restored, according to the company. Amazon has also informed users that it will provide more details on the event once they have completed a full investigation.

Read full story: Guardian Unlimited

Related topics: Data Center, Web