I'm not sure where you get this idea, but AWS has definitely had global outages. 1.5 years ago there were massive global issues with S3, causing even their own status dashboard to malfunction.

edit: I stand corrected. Apparently the S3 outage wasn't global, though its effects were.

Meanwhile, this outage has only really been noticeable to ops teams, since it doesn't affect existing nodes or anything outside GKE. It's definitely concerning and the fix is taking far too long, but as far as global outages go the impact is relatively minor.

On February 28th, 2017, S3 had issues in us-east-1, not globally. It just happens that most customers create their buckets in us-east-1. (It’s the default bucket creation region.)

Buckets creation/deletion is a global operation, namespaces are all global for it. When us-east-1 goes down, so does bucket creation. All other operations proceed merrily, but yeah as we see over and over again, whenever us-east-1 has an outage everything seems to shit the bed because they've built everything out in us-east-1. Hopefully us-east-2 is starting to eat in to that.

This is correct (or at least was a couple years ago).

Correct, but quite a few AWS services are built on S3, and some apparently weren't using buckets per region.

That only affected buckets on us-east-1.

I worked at a company that was highly dependent on us-east at the time. We survived. This is very different