As a consummate geek and science fiction writer, I’m pretty well versed in the world of sci-fi geekery. So people might have noticed that Skynet, the supercomputer intelligence that declares war on the entire world in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles starts its genocidal rampage on April 21^st, 2011. And, guess what, the Amazon EC2 service crashed yesterday.

Thinq_ is running with an article right now giving us some insight into Amazon’s response about the potential involvement of this AI superintelligence in yesterday’s crash that took down sites such as Reddit, Hootsuite, and Quora.

The coincidental timing of the Amazon cloud storage outage and Skynet’s supposed attack against humanity didn’t go unnoticed – but Amazon has acted quickly to reassure humanity that a simple lack of adequate peak storage capacity, rather than a genocidal AI, was responsible for the failure.

Responding to a customer’s enquiry on the Amazon Web Services developer forum, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that – as far as he was aware – Skynet was innocent. “From the information I have and to answer your questions,” Luke explained, “Skynet did not have anything to do with the service event at this time.”

According to the original Terminator movie series Skynet was supposed to become self-aware way back in August of 1997. Perhaps, if the new one did crash EC2, the AI is simply more sophisticated and interested in data curation and cloud computing.

Yesterday’s failure does bring up a few real-world questions when it comes to how different sites deal with outages. In the beginning nothing came out of Hootsuite at all except for a cute little owl wearing a hardhat and Reddit displayed a usual style of “you broke Reddit” type error page. Eventually, Reddit moved onto a read-only display of popular reddits with some additional posts by administrators in order to keep their visitors happy.

The draw of cloud-storage and -computing has certainly been the cheap cost of supercomputing but it’s also been touted across a lot of the industry as more fault tolerant than having a single data center to work out of. However, if EC2 can burn down completely and take major sites with it in this manner, it might open up questions about how outfits handle their cloud power.

Amazon might just see themselves edged out by a business setup capable of quickly recapitulating load across their larger network to keep sites running (even if slowly.) It’ll depend largely on the culture out there, of course, if they’re more interested in things staying up but getting very sluggish or if they’d rather let stuff go down for a shorter period of time while it sees its repairs.

On the Internet uptime is king—so it’s hard to believe anyone would join into even a cheap cloud setup if they expected that they’d suffer almost a day’s worth of loss.

Of course, if Skynet does obtain self-awareness and immediately goes into the cloud, perhaps we can stave off its genocidal tendencies by giving it a job there. I know that reading Reddit quickly eats up a lot of my time…