The worst cloud outages of 2013 (so far)

From Amazon to Dropbox and Microsoft to Google, we've seen some nasty cloud outages in the first half of the year. Which company failed the worst?

Warning: Stormy skies ahead

Cloud computing provides plenty of perks for both businesses and casual users, but while cloud servers may live in fluffy white shapes in the sky, they aren't immune to earthly errors.

As any cloud dweller knows, Web-based services can crash and burn just like any other type of technology. If the companies behind them are smart, you shouldn't lose any data in the long run -- but you'll likely lose a bit of sanity during the time the service is offline.

While 2013's only halfway done, we've already seen some cringe-worthy cloud failures this year. Here are the worst -- so far.

Amazon takes a nosedive

Date: Jan. 31, 2013

Duration: 49 minutes

Failure: Amazon Web Services have been responsible for major outages before, but it's not often that the company's own Amazon.com home page goes down. Earlier this year, though, it did just that: Instead of its usual array of eye-catching wares, Amazon.com displayed a simple text error message for almost an hour on an otherwise uneventful January day.

The message, "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable," shed little light on what was actually going on. Internet speculationinitially suggested a denial-of-service attack might have been involved, but those claims appeared to be dubious. While Amazon never officially commented on the cause,later reports indicated an internal issue was more likely the culprit.