From the article - "The outage underscores the vulnerabilities of depending on the public cloud versus using your own data centers."<p>No it doesn't. It underscores the vulnerabilities of not understanding your hosting and accepting the "no outages" slogans of ANY cloud. A single data centre is always susceptible to outages like this, it doesn't matter who owns it. If any of those sites had owned a single data centre that was hit by storm damage, the impact would be the same. I know this is supposed to be the year of the cloud backlash but even so...
It's funny, the more I think about I think this is actually a good reason to host on the cloud. From a technical standpoint it's terrifying to see all these big players down at once. But what the average user likely sees is "something is wrong with the internet". So rather than seeing that your site X is down and users being angry with you, users are probably likely to think "well instagram is also down, oh and so is netflix, something big must be broken, I'll check back later" the same way users don't blame you if the power goes out.
If you are hosting on a server(as everyone is) it will, at some point fail. You have to choose a service that has minimal failure combined with quick resolution times. I think AWS fits this description...
Google, MS, Rackspace etc. ought to give a good look at all the middle layer libraries like boto, and support them to make it a matter of configuration to switch cloud service providers.<p>This already works well for email providers.