I think they should have led with insensitivity about it and maybe a white lie. Such as... We took our main region us-east-1 down for X hours because we wanted to remind people they need to design for failure of a region :-)

Shameless plugs (authored months ago): http://tuxlabs.com/?p=380 - How To: Maximize Availability Effeciently Using AWS Availability Zones ( note read it, its not just about AZ's it is very clear to state multi-regions and better yet multi-cloud segway...second article) http://tuxlabs.com/?p=430 - AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and the singularity of the future Internet