I certainly wouldn't describe it as “a pass” given how commonly people joke about things like “friends don't let friends use us-east-1”. There's also a reporting bias: because many places only use us-east-1, you're more likely to hear about it even if it only affects a fraction of customers, and many of those companies blame AWS publicly because that's easier than admitting that they were only using one AZ, etc.

These big outages are noteworthy because they _do_ affect people who correctly architected for reliability — and they're pretty rare. This one didn't affect one of my big sites at all; the other was affected by the S3 / Fargate issues but the last time that happened was 2017.

That certainly could be better but so far it hasn't been enough to be worth the massive cost increase of using multiple providers, especially if you can have some basic functionality provided by a CDN when the origin is down (true for the kinds of projects I work on). GCP and Azure have had their share of extended outages, too, so most of the major providers tend to be careful to cast stones about reliability, and it's _much_ better than the median IT department can offer.

From the original outage thread:

“If you're having SLA problems I feel bad for you son I got two 9 problems cuz of us-east-1”

if you care about the availability of a single geographical availability zone, it's your own fault.