I'm wondering if they got nailed by out-migration charges and how much that was. I assume a bunch of their images were in S3. Amazon charges a pretty penny to take things out.
I'm confused by this. S3 GET requests are the cheapest request type, and getting the images out would just cost you the bandwidth involved.
Maybe you're mixing things up with Glacier?
GET Requests are cheap But I was thinking of bandwidth costs to get things out of S3 entirely and do a complete outmigration. But the prices there have come down quite a bit since I last checked.
Bandwidth costs of a one-off transfer out would be a lot less than they were already paying to serve those images out of S3 to the public.