Having not heard of E2 before (it never seems to come up in the comparisons the other object-storage providers do to make themselves look good) — do you know why it has such bad availability? "Weeks of downtime" sounds crazy for a business focused on storage.
If they aren't also failing at durability, then it wouldn't be any of the classical problems associated with running a storage cluster. Do they just... not bother with online maintenance / upgrades / hardware transitions?
My best guess is their primary product is a Windows (I think) backup client that has a place for smarts allowing them to paper over problems, or something along those lines. Feels like an "oh Germany is down again, when is Frank back from holiday so he can catch a plane to replace the switch?" type affair. If you google around the Reddit data hoarder communities you'll find plenty of war stories about E2
If they aren't also failing at durability, then it wouldn't be any of the classical problems associated with running a storage cluster. Do they just... not bother with online maintenance / upgrades / hardware transitions?