> it's ok, everyone else is down too and we have no idea when it will be back.

AWS has never gone down across all regions at once. So we can do something about going down. You build the system to be multi-region and be able to evacuate traffic from one region to another, so when us-east-1 goes down again, you simply route around the damage and use resources in us-west2 until us-east-1 comes back up. People don't appreciate how much backend engineering goes into keeping something like Twitter up at all times.

Put it another way. Little guys go down when us-east-1 goes down. The big boys stay up no matter what.