Amazon.com Inc.'s S3 storage service crashed Friday morning, bringing down for several hours businesses around the world which relied it.

"For one of our services, the Amazon Simple Storage Service, one of our three geographic locations was unreachable for approximately two hours and was back to operating at over 99% of normal performance before 7 a.m. pacific standard time," Amazon said.

The popular S3 service offers cheap, accessible Web storage for hundreds of thousands of companies which cannot afford or do not want to bother to set up their own professional storage servers. The New York Times also reported that it used S3 to store and deliver articles from its historical archives, and portions of the archive was down during S3's hiccups.

"We’ve been operating this service for two years and we’re proud of our uptime track record. Any amount of downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until it’s perfect," Amazon said in its statement.

By the end of 2007, about 330,000 people had registered to use the S3 services, which use the so-called "cloud storage" and charge $0.15 per GB a month to store data, with additional fees to transfer data in and out. This is often cheaper than buying and operating storage equipment, and far simpler.

Apparently, no data was lost.