On Friday morning, Crosscut.com was afflicted by the outages in Amazon's cloud service, where Crosscut resides. Amazon has finally restored all our service, so we are now posting new stories and images and hope to be back "on track" with regular posting by the end of Monday (April 25).

Thanks for your patience, as well as the many emails wondering where we went. Thanks, too, to Johann Heller and his colleagues at Web Collective, for working across the weekend to put together a backup version we used for a time Monday morning. Here's a good story on Amazon's problems, and the lessons that sites like Crosscut need to learn from it: plan for failure!

Some of the stories you see today were put up Friday. A newsletter email went out that day with those stories, but that turned out to be just minutes before the site vanished. We will continue adding new stories through the course of the day today.