But AWS has the concept of availability zones that they equate to a data center. AWS refers to an AZ as an "isolated location". It's becoming clear with the S3 outages and this outage that isolation is not as robust as expected so now we see more reference to cross-region replication. But unlike cross-AZ services like S3 or DynamoDB, you need to build your own cross-region replication and failover.

Yep. My take: humans fail at more than hardware does, and AWS takes a lot of action per region.

That's why my aws console wasn't working properly this afternoon. It seems that Amazon is not using it's services correctly

Nonsense. The console is hosted out of us-east-1. Also, please learn to spell before posting. Thanks.

and pay double? no way

It's not paying double. Take the total number of instances serving the app and divide them across data centers and availability zones within datacenters. This might require adding a few of servers if the app is replicated across a very small number of instances, but for apps that already have a significant number of instances to handle the capacity, it's just a matter of rearranging things.

Depending on how quickly new instances of the app can be brought up to, it may be worthwhile to run a bit more capacity so that the remaining instances don't melt down should all the instances in one zone become unavailable.

Hardware will always fail at some point. You can either add extra resources elsewhere, or deal with that inevitable downtime. Both are reasonable, depending on the impact of downtime.

Enjoy your downtime then.