I assume the author isn't asking "What if there was a 30 minute outage of us-east-1" (just wait for it to come back) or "What if there was an outage of a single AZ in us-east-1" (just spin things up in a different AZ)

Rather, they're asking "What if there was a 30 day outage of us-east-1" - so anyone who isn't multi-region or multi-cloud loses everything, including backups, AMIs, and control plane access.

(FWIW I agree with people disagreeing with the worry levels in the article - a solar storm last seen in 1859 is more likely than a software bug? Ha!)

Please don't mischaracterise the point: The solar storm is not more likely than a software bug. The effect of the solar storm is more likely than a similar effect by a software bug (particularly in the context of AWS).

realistically if AWS is down for 1+ day in that region you will be wondering very much if they're coming back in just 1hr more, 1 more day, 1 month or if at all.

Yeah, it's kind of "incredible" that they'd be gone for so long, but I've been on AWS during long outages before and it's never certain how long it will go on for and if data will be kept.

We assume too much I think of our providers, and I believe that's what the post is about. If you already _know_ AWS will be down for 30 days then you can make an informed decision based on that.

For me, there's no difference between 8 hours or 80, if you're down more than 8hrs I'm going to activate my redundancies. But: I have redundancies. Many people don't.

Curious has AWS us-east-1 ever been down for more that 8+ hours at a time?

"It hasn't happened since 1859" has nothing to do with whether it's likely to happen soon. You can get heads 162 times in a row when flipping a coin, it's not likely to happen but it's possible. In this case the chance of it happening is not 50%, so us going ~162 years since the last one isn't that weird. That doesn't mean the chance is 0% - we could lose that coin flip this year.

This is related to Tim's mention of climate change - lately, '100-year' and '10-year' storms are happening more often. It's possible the changes to our climate have turned those 100-year storms into 10-year storms, but we may not know until the observations and climate models catch up.

The solar storm would be more likely to, as you said, take down the region for a significant period of time. A software bug is more likely to happen, but less likely to have that big of an impact.

Surprisingly, this was published (though maybe not written) just after FB locked out all their employees with a bad config...