Exactly. Anyone running their own data center would be subject to exactly this kind of outage, and wouldn't have access to the many, many resources that cloud providers make available to ensure successful fail-over.

Yes, I can see the "many, many resources" Amazon is making available to you in this situation. Did they send you a rubber ball that you can squeeze while waiting for your servers to come back up?

They said fail-over. Those "many, many resources" are other regions and zones.

I thought both Heroku & Netflix had fairly robust multi-AZ deployments, so I'm hoping they share any of their learnings from this outage.

Either way, that quote is ridiculous.

Netflix does, but considering the time, running out of capacity after loosing a zone might have been more of an issue.

Definitely a possibility - I was actually watching Netflix when my phone started rattling with all the alerts.

I was able to finish out the episode, so their CDN was working for the actual media, but everything else was dead for me.

Another useless anecdote: A coworker was watching on his xbox, and it apparently cut mid-stream for him.

Heroku doesn't. They are on US-East.

Heroku is single-AZ within US-East, not even multiple-AZ.

Sorry but that is not even remotely true. We are hosted across all availability zones in the US-EAST region.

Ah, I didn't know that. Sorry. (I don't remember where I heard about single-AZ but it seemed consistent with observation)

Is Heroku resilient against single-AZ failure (so only some subset of customers go down, and then it restarts), or is it exposed so that if any AZ goes down, core stuff also goes down? The sites I care about on Heroku seem to go down whenever any US-East badness happens at all, even if it is "limited to a single AZ" per Amazon.

Actually it shows the inability to rely on amazon. A storm causes a complete disaster? Where is the redundant connections? The independent power supply? Heck where is the storm drains?

Thats sort of what some large storms can do - esp when they come with a large amount of electrical activity in them. You can easily suffer all kinds damage to power system that generators can't deal with.

That's exactly why they offer multiple zones. You can't make a single zone of anything 100% fault-tolerant.