They went and bought a bunch of literal servers and installed them in a datacenter, 90 miles away from our offices, and this is where all our applications ran for the remainder of that company's existence (about 6 more years). For the whole time I was at that company, we had somewhat more, and usually more lengthy, outages than the average startup. The only difference is that when some piece of networking gear took a crap, or a disk failed, or whatever, our guys had to diagnose and resolve it (Their karma, I guess, since this was their idea).
Anyway, I do think it would be good if at least so-calld 'tech companies' had a little less obsession to outsource everything -- even easy things -- to AWS, GCP, and Azure. I feel that way mainly for cost reasons as many of these services are wildly overpriced. But also we shouldn't kid ourselves by ignoring the advantages of operating at the scale those guys do. They can afford to have multiple absolute wizards available around the clock who make sure that when a problem happens, it's not the kind of "S-show" we had at my old company where we're all on a slack room or zoom or whatever and just guessing at to try for half an hour before we can figure out what the actual issue is.