Amazon offered an explanation for its recent outage of its "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud" (EC2) with a long missive, all 5,694 words of it.
Don't feel like reading 5,694 words right now? We've made it easy for you with a handy word cloud, giving you the gist of the company's apology that's long enough to be a book chapter.
Given Amazon's usual pattern of disclosure (here's a good example from 2008), we're thinking the company had only the best of intentions with this lengthy explanation. More cynical observers might think the highly technical treatise used thousands of words to obfuscate the fact that the document was an apology.
Taking a look at the word cloud we created above, even though EBS (Elastic Block Store) figures prominently, we couldn't find the words "sorry," "apologize" or even "regret." But after reading the huge document, we were impressed with how Amazon has gone to great lengths to prevent this from happening again.
And to be fair, Amazon did offer its apology in the last paragraph: "Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize." Nice.