How likely was it that one plane would fly into the World Trade Center, let alone two?

I'm not going to go too deeply into speculative scenarios, but all kinds of business-interrupting calamities are possible with very low probability. We just had the story on the frontpage about the Juniper backdoor; do you think S3 isn't being targeted by multiple state intelligence agencies?

Basically I agree with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10772321 - by all means keep the working copy online, but have a local offline backup.

Pull out the more general example. Unexpected shit happens. A bad code push deletes data, a disgruntled employee decides to leave a "present" after they leave, etc. All things that have happened before. Having a backup away from production makes it much more easy to recover from unplanned outages.

"That's absurdly unlikely to happen with S3."

How absurd was it that money market funds would fall below $1 during the recent unpleasantness ? It was so unthinkable that major parts of our entire global economy were predicated upon it never happening.

It happened.

Money markets are even more "serious business" than Amazon, or even all of tech is, and had even more big brains attesting to their inability to fail. They failed.

Right. If that happens, I likely have MUCH bigger problems to worry about, e.g., finding the nearest VAULT-TEC vault.