Can you please give more details about your set up, the country you are accessing EC2 from etc? I am curious to know coz I am in the process of putting all my eggs in the EC2 basket now.
I'm in Austria, and I quite often ssh into servers in the US, with no problems at all. I've been having lots of issues with the EC2 tools timing out, though.
My requests time out an awful lot:
Read timeout. Please try again later. If this persists please visit the AWS developer forums to see if it's the result of a known issue.
That and doubts about permanent storage are downers.