The immediate consequence here is that Amazon EC2 customers will need to deploy copies of the same server instance in multiple regions to guarantee 100% system uptime, assuming, of course, that the wildly unlikely scenario that multiple Amazon cloud computing regions experience outages at the same time never transpires.

FORBES: Will Amazon Outage Stop GovCloud?

Officials said the overall uptime for the order-routing system is 99.96% for the year thus far.

CNN: Software glitch forces brief shutdown of Nasdaq

This means that if energy is required on a constant basis then the system needs to be backed-up by conventional sources of power 73% of the time, and there are days when the back-up system is required for more than 90% of the time (In Germany, the industry association insists that renewables uptime averages 10%).

FORBES: Why "Green Fossils" Matter So Much To Africa's Energy Future