Are you finding it easier to get work done today? Are you plagued by fewer distractions? Perhaps you should thank Amazon. It turns out Amazon had a little hiccup this morning with its cloud services that some pretty big customers use. Those customers include Foursquare, Reddit and Quora, among others.  I have to thank Chanel Lee of FanStuff for alerting me to the story. I read up on it over at The Next Web. I’m sure some users have felt a moment of panic — I’m one of them. How can I hope to maintain my status as Foursquare mayor of HowStuffWorks.com if I can’t check in?

One of Amazon’s many services is what the company calls Elastic Cloud Compute. Several Web-based services pay Amazon for use of its server database to crunch numbers and store data. It lets startup companies get up and running without having to invest in the purchase and maintenance of hardware — you just rent the horsepower from Amazon instead. It’s a brilliant plan unless something goes wrong.

This morning, something went wrong. The actual cause of the problem isn’t entirely clear but Amazon’s service health dashboard has kept customers abreast all morning of the company’s efforts to rectify the issue. This sort of thing is bound to happen with any system — machines break down, an update to some code might interfere with a device in a way that no one expected or one of a million other problems might pop up. If you’re confident that your service provider will identify and fix problems in a timely manner, you may be willing to take that risk. But even if you decide to go it alone you have to come to grips that sometimes stuff breaks.

In a way, it’s good that these problems happen now and then. They help illustrate that there’s no perfect system out there. And if Amazon is able to respond in a nimble and satisfactory way, the mistake may actually turn out to be a positive thing in the long run. If it’s clear that Amazon can fix problems faster than a smaller company could then it may win more business from startups.

In the meantime, get some work done. Soon enough, all these services will be back going at full speed and the distractions will begin again.