Few people are as thoroughly engulfed in the mishmash of online-only services collectively dubbed “the cloud” as I am. Being a modern, always-mobile technology writer, I’ve arranged my workflow to be completely independent of my physical location. I need the ability to plop down in front of any computer in the world, and suffer from minimal disruption.

Most of my work is stored in SkyDrive. I coordinate story assignments with coworkers using Google Docs, and live the rest of my life in Gmail, Evernote, HipChat, and Pixlr. Heck, I even subscribe to Slacker Radio and numerous video streaming services so that a world of entertainment is always just a URL away—complete with synchronized playlists and instant queues. (Yep, I’m a cord cutter.)

Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, let’s turn to the nasty. Several incidents during the past week drove home a bleak realization: Yes, the cloud is flexible and powerful and paradigm-shattering—but you just can’t rely on it completely.

Where’s the Advil?

The headaches started last Friday when Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud service melted down for an extended period. That didn’t bother me, personally—I’m not a business looking to “quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.” Nonetheless, the outage soon spread to consumer-facing applications. Multiple Xbox features went down for the count: Cloud-stored game saves, Xbox SmartGlass, and even Halo 4’s online functionality were disrupted for several hours.

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